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Modern Theories of Art, 1
 Moshe Barasch

MODERN THEORIES
OF ART, 1
From Winckelmann to Baudelaire

rn
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1990
 Copyright © 1990 by New York University
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barasch, Moshe.
Modern theories of art, 1: from Winckelmann to Baudelaire/
Moshe Barasch
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
ISBN 0-8147—1133—2 (alk. paper)
1. Art—Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics, Modern—18th century
3. Aesthetics, Modern—19th century. I. Title
N70.B2 1989 89—34682
701—dc20 Cle

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Book design by Ken Venezio

 Contents

PREFACE vil

1. THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 1

2. BEGINNINGS OF THE NEW AGE 89

3. UNITY AND DIVERSITY OF THE VISUAL ARTS 146

4. THE SYMBOL 224

§. THE ARTIST 284

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 391

NAME INDEX 409

SUBJECT INDEX 415

All illustrations appear as a group following p. 184.

 Preface

The themes and doctrines presented in this volume have held my

attention for many years. In the course of time I have been helped, or
forced, to clarify and develope some of the ideas—amainly by students,
whose persistent questions | remember with gratitude. In pursuing the
studies that led to this history of art theory I leaned heavily on the help
of librarians. Wherever I came, they have offered me help and friend-
ship. With particular gratitude I should record the assistance offered by
the staff of the University Library in Jerusalem, and by the librarians at
Yale University. It is a pleasure to acknowledge gratefully the lively and
stimulating interest Mr. Colin Jones, director of New York University
Press, has taken in this book. I was encouraged by him in all the stages
of writing. In the process of publication the book has benefited from
the care and devoted attention of Mrs. Despina P. Gimbel, managing
editor of the press. Mrs. Mira Reich helped me in many ways, and not
for the first time. I enjoyed the continuing help of Dr. Luba Freedman,
colleague and former student. And, as with all the books I have written,
I thank my wife once again for her particular blend of encouragement,
criticism, and forbearance.

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

I. INTRODUCTION

Students of letters are apt to balk at drawing sharply demarcated lines

between periods. Such students, particularly when they have historical
leanings, know better than most that, as a rule, the past persists in the
present, and that what now seems the typical expression of the present
has often been anticipated in the past. History is a constantly moving
stream, and in this dynamic complexity the attempt to find, or establish,
watertight compartments is almost a desperate one. This banal truth is
valid, of course, also for the history of reflection on the figurative arts,
that is, the theory of painting and sculpture. Particularly when we come
closer to modern times, where the clarifying effect of historical distance
offers us less support than in the case of the more remote past, the
difficulties of periodization become more manifest. No wonder, then,
that few will venture to suggest a precise date at which modern art
theory begins. And yet students of our subject cannot help feeling that
around the middle of the eighteenth century some events occurred
that, small as they may seem, indicate a dramatic turning point in the
tradition of aesthetic reflection on the visual arts, and thus can be taken
to announce a new age. I should like to mention a few of these events.
To most of the developments mentioned we shall have to come back in
 Modern Theories of Art

different contexts for more detailed discussions. Here | shall list them
only in concise form. The crowding of these dates within the short span
of fifteen years may indicate the profound transformation that becomes
manifest at the middle of the century.
Precisely at mid-century, in 1750, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a
student and teacher of Latin rhetoric and poetry, published a volumi-
nous book bearing the word Aesthetica on its title page (after he had
already used that term in the dissertation he had composed fifteen years
earlier). Aesthetics, he said, denotes a special domain of cognition,
namely the domain of sensual cognition. To be sure, in the hierarchy of
cognitional modes sensual cognition occupies a lower rank than cogni-
tions based on pure ideas of logical derivation, but it is recognized as a
domain in its own right, with a distinct character. In Baumgarten’s
presentation the domain of aesthetics is not clearly and firmly outlined,
but it was only a short time before the term he coined came to denote
what we now understand by it. Though originally not intended primar-
ily for use in the discussion of the arts, it soon proved an excellent
conceptual framework for such a discussion, and, as one knows, it has
remained so till this very day.
Shortly after the publication of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica the attentive
reader must have felt that he was witnessing a kind of eruption. The
year 1755 proved particularly abundant in expressions of aesthetic
thought. In that year Moses Mendelssohn published his Briefe iiber die
Empfindungen, trying to define the philosophical status of aesthetics.
Since beauty is an “indistinct image of a perfection,” he believed, God
can have no perception of beauty; this is a particularly human experi-
ence. In the same year a young and hitherto unknown schoolmaster and
librarian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, published a slim pamphlet,
Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture. The
little treatise achieved a surprising success; the rich echo it found clearly
shows that the ideas suggested in it were “in the air,” the generation
waiting for them to be expressed. When only eleven years later Gott-
hold Ephraim Lessing, who in literary history is perceived in the role of
Moses who led his people out of French servitude toward the promised
land of Deutsche Klassik, published his Laocoén (1766), he argued energeti-
cally against some of Winckelmann’s assertions, but he clearly treated
 The Early Eighteenth Century

the ideas expressed in Thoughts on the Imitation as generally known and

authoritative. Two years before that date, in 1764, Winckelmann, who
in the meantime had moved to Rome, published his History of Ancient
Art. It was the first work to use the term “history of art” as a
description of a field of study, and the first to employ it in the title of
the work. One can say that, in an important sense, the year 1764 is the
year in which the history of art was born as an academic discipline.
The year 1755 proved crucial in still another respect. In that year
began the more or less systematic archaeological excavations of Pompeii
and Herculaneum. The impact on arts and letters of what these exca-
vations brought to light was not uniform, but it was vivid and almost
instantaneous. Already, a year before the beginning of the systematic
excavations, Charles Cochin fils and J. Bellicard published their Observa-
tions sur les antiquités de la ville d’Herculaneum (1754). In this work they
tried to come to terms with the little that was as yet known about the
city, and they actually rejected the testimony of what had been found,
considering it a marginal phenomenon. In our next chapter we shall
have occasion to describe how this attitude changed. The great folio
edition of Le Antichitd di Ercolano began to appear in 1757 (the seventh
volume was published in 1779), and its impact was immediate. It is now
generally accepted that, beginning about 1760, developments in the
visual arts, especially the ‘“‘classicist” trend, were accelerated by the new
archaeological publications, particularly by engravings after the paintings
in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Both artists and patrons (among them
successive ministers of Louis XV and Louis XVI) were imbued with a
new spirit and found authoritative legitimization in what could be
learned from the ancient paintings revealed. But it was not only on
painting that the great new discoveries imposed themselves. Theoretical
reflection on the arts could not neglect the revelations mediated by
what was discovered. The themes of art theory were enlarged by the
results of the excavations. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods the
impact of the classical tradition was largely determined by the sculptural
remains so generously present in Rome. Now, with the treasures of
Pompeii becoming known, it is increasingly painting, color, and vivid
illusion that form the image of Antiquity.
The crucial decade between 1750 and 1760 saw still another major
 Modern Theories of Art

departure in the annals of theoretical reflection on the arts. In 1759

Denis Diderot began to publish his critical reviews of the Salons, the
biennial exhibitions of contemporary French painting. Art criticism was
not invented by Diderot—he had forerunners; but it was only with
him that this branch of art literature became institutionalized, and
attained the significance we now assign to it. As one follows Diderot’s
successive reviews one can actually observe how art criticism emerges
and takes shape. The movement was rapid, and the leaps were wide.
The review of 1759 is still modest in size and conservative in taste; the
critic here follows the publisher Grimm and his personal attitudes quite
closely. The exhibition of 1761 is reviewed at greater length, with an
analysis of details and considerable background to the discussion of the
individual paintings. Diderot at this point hesitates much less in pro-
nouncing his personal judgment. With the next review (discussing the
exhibition of 1763), it has been said, began the great period of Diderot’s
art criticism. Now he was on familiar terms with the artists; he had
visited them in their ateliers. Perhaps the most striking sign that art
criticism had come of age was that Diderot spoke not only of the
paintings and the artists who produced them, but also reflected on the
virtues and limitations of criticism itself. With the review of 1765 the
transformation of art criticism into art theory is completed: in addition
to the criticism of that year’s exhibits, and intimately interwoven with
his critical judgments, Diderot presented his “Essay on Painting,” a
theoretical consideration of the basic elements of that art. As the history
of art had come of age with Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art of
1764, so did art criticism with Diderot’s review of the Salons of 1763
and 1765.
What was achieved in the roughly fifteen years between Baumgar-
ten’s Aesthetica and Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art or Diderot’s
“Essay on Painting” was not only the establishment of aesthetics, the
history of art, and art criticism as important disciplines for which the
future held great developments in store. More than this, one may safely
say, the whole approach to the visual arts was altered, its very founda-
tions radically transformed. No wonder, then, that there was a change
in the scope and character of theoretical art literature, both with regard
to the audience addressed and the aims the authors set out to achieve.
 The Early Eighteenth Century

It is only logical also that a shift took place in the actual themes
discussed in art theory. These transformations were so radical and
comprehensive that one can well understand historians who, notwith-
standing their natural hesitation, chose 1750 as the date symbolically
marking the beginning of a new age.
Yet it is equally clear, I hope, that this momentous transformation
that burst into the open within the narrow confines of a decade and a
haif, could not have taken place had it not been evolving—hidden
from sight, as it were—over a longer period of time. What, one feels
compelled to ask, brought this change about? What made it possible?
How are we to understand that some formulations, suggesting rather
than fully expressing ideas that were revolutionary for their time, had
such a profound and instantaneous impact? Not much effort need be
expended to convince the student that an analysis of the generation or
two preceding the crucial dates I have just listed may yield interesting
results. It is our present task to undertake such an analysis. We shall
try to discuss (as far as possible within the limits of a single chapter)
pertinent developments in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is
of course not our intention to provide an exhaustive picture of intellec-
tual life in this half-century, even if limited to reflection on the arts.
Whatever we shall talk about, we shall do so with one question in
mind: what prepared the revolution of the mid-century?
In the course of the chapter we shall look at three groups of authors
who approached the problem of the visual arts from quite different
points of departure. Though one cannot hermetically isolate one group
from the other (an individual author may well belong to two groups at
the same time, or at different periods of his life), one can safely claim
that these groups differed in both background and aims. Yet one will
see, I hope, that in spite of their disparateness they have some constit-
uent elements or orientations in common, and thus fit into an overall
picture both of the age as a whole and of the specific problems (and
formulations) of reflection on the visual arts.
The first group to be considered are the philosophers. In the early
eighteenth century the term “philosopher” is not as clear—or so at
least it seems to the modern student—as it was in the age of Plato and
Aristotle, or even in that of Descartes. Not only are there no towering
 Modern Theories of Art

figures in the thought of the first half of the eighteenth century; the
very scope and nature of a philosopher’s subject matter is obscured.
Frequently therefore we shall have to ask whether a certain figure is a
philosopher or whether he should rather be classified with the critics,
the historians, or some other group. In the present chapter, then, the
term “philosopher” should be taken with even more caution than is
usually necessary. In speaking of philosophers I have in mind those
thinkers who dealt mainly with general problems and whose contribu-
tion to the study of the arts is usually detached from the consideration
of specific works of art or particular techniques.
Another type, altogether different from the philosophers both in the
kind of material they studied and in the frame of mind they brought to
that study, are the antiquarians. In the first half of the eighteenth
century they attained notoriety, and became an important and charac-
teristic feature of the intellectual life of the time. Usually avoiding high
abstraction, and often afraid of any kind of generalization, they did not
contribute directly to the study and interpretation of art as such or to
the theories about it. Yet their variegated activity and ample legacy had
an important, if often roundabout, effect on the various attempts to
reflect theoretically on what the painter and sculptor do. A careful
study of how the antiquarians looked at their objects, and of what they
tried to find in them, can help us better understand how that seemingly
sudden revolution that burst forth in the middle of the century was
being prepared for behind the scenes.
The artists themselves are the last, though obviously not the least
important, group whose testimony is to be considered in this chapter.
There is no dearth of sources. Some of the painters who lived in the
first half of the eighteenth century actually spoke at great length about
their art. But the analysis of their literary legacy poses, as we shall see,
particularly difficult problems of interpretation. If one accepts the
readings here suggested, then artists’ testimony may be found to shed a
particularly interesting light on what was going on—perhaps hidden
from most of the authors themselves—in that transitory period, the
first half of the eighteenth century, preparing the coming of a new age.
 The Early Eighteenth Century

IL LHE PHILOSOPERERS

1. VICO

To begin an attempt at drawing a map of eighteenth-century theories

of painting and sculpture with a discussion of Giambattista Vico may
call for a word of explanation. At first blush, not much seems to
recommend the evoking of Vico’s spirit in this particular context. He
did not have an appreciable influence in his own period; he was
“discovered” only in the nineteenth century. Most important, he was
not concerned with art; his work is perhaps best described as a
philosophy of culture; he has also been called “the father of sociology.”
Though he devoted great attention to what he calls “poetics,” he did
not cover the whole range of the arts, and what he has to say about the
visual arts is next to nothing. Why then does a student of modern art
theory feel impelled to invite his readers to immerse themselves in the
teachings of this strange author, who seems to be marginal to our
domain? In the following pages it will emerge, I hope, that Vico
articulated the basis of one of the great trends in modern thought on
art, including thought on the figurative arts of painting and sculpture.
Some of the encompassing problems that have remained central issues
in the theory of art were first projected by Vico onto the horizon of
European reflection. If Vico, then, is not a productive “source” for the
understanding of what his own generation believed and said, he allows
us to glance into what was hidden in the depths of eighteenth-century
thought.
The obscure conditions of Vico’s life have provided an attractive
theme for modern historians. Born in Naples in 1668, the son of a
modest bookseller, he spent most of his life in his native city, and died
there in 1744. He held an inferior professorship in “rhetoric,” comple-
menting his modest salary with all kinds of occasional jobs, among them
the composition of other people’s inaugural lectures (some of which
contain his most original ideas). A cripple all his life as a result of a fall
in childhood, he lived in ill-fated family conditions and embittered
poverty, his genius not recognized for several generations. This biogra-
phy, some scholars suggest, ' is romantically exaggerated. We know that
 Modern Theories of Art

Montesquieu bought a copy of Vico’s book and that Goethe, during his
trip to Italy in 1787, spoke of him with great admiration.” But though
his vita obviously needs correction in some respects, it remains essen-
tially accurate. A philosopher out of place and born before his time—
this rather stereotyped traditional verdict has more than a kernel of
truth. Vico published several studies, but his central work, the Scienza
nuova, exerted a magic spell on his life. After it was printed in a first
edition (1725), he practically rewrote it for the second one (1730); he
kept on adding to it, and when it was reprinted in the year of his death,
it was again considerably enlarged and changed. Yet in spite of this
continual struggle to shape his work, Vico’s style remained baroque,
undisciplined, and often obscure. The eighteenth century, which so
much admired clarity, punished him for his faults by forgetting him.
Eventually, however, the abundance and originality of his ideas pre-
vailed.
We are of course not concerned with Vico’s system as a whole, and
shall look only at what may be of significance—even if not directly—
for an understanding of modern theories of art. Among the great themes
of Vico’s thought is a version of what we would today call aesthetics.
Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher who did so much to revive
Vico, believes that aesthetics should actually be considered a discovery
of Vico,’ though, as one knows, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined
the term only ten years after the first edition of the Scienza nuova was
published. But Vico’s approach to the aesthetic domain is not the usual
one, and it never became the accepted academic pattern. He conceived
of aesthetics, which he called “poetics,” as being concerned with a basic
human activity, seeking not to give pleasure or embellish truths but to
articulate a vision of the world.
Vico’s main approach to “poetics” is the analysis of language. In
language, he believed, we make a basic distinction between two modes,
the literal and the metaphorical. To be literal is to call things by their
appropriate names and to describe them in plain, simple terms; to use
metaphor is a poetical way of creating vivid, imaginative effects.* The
significance for our subject of what Vico has to say about this distinction
derives from the fact that metaphor, a descriptive mode of expression,
 The Early Eighteenth Century

has a natural affinity to images. The discussion of metaphors is, by

implication, a discussion of the nature and validity of images.
The origin of metaphor is one of Vico’s important themes. Metaphor
and simile, even allegory, are not deliberate artifices, calculated, thought-
out forms. They are natural ways of expressing a vision of life and
reality. Vico sharply rejects the views of those “philologians” who
conceive of language as a product of convention. “On the contrary,” he
says, because the meanings of words have a natural origin, “they must
have had natural significations” (444).° Language has many features and
tropes, but “the most luminous and therefore the most necessary and
frequent is metaphor” (402). It is by metaphor that we try to animate
nature and give “sense and passion to insensate things” (404). “It is
noteworthy,” he continues, “that in all languages the greater part of the
expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from
the human body and its parts and from human senses and _passions”
(405). In metaphor then (and, by implication, in imagery) we come to
terms with the world surrounding us, and make it part of ourselves.
To grasp the full revolutionary significance of these views one has to
see them against their proper historical background. The late seven-
teenth century was a time in which the very use of metaphor was
widely suspect, its theoretical justification hardly imaginable. Metaphor
was considered directly opposed to any scientific frame of mind. Profes-
sor M. H. Abrams, in his well-known work The Mirror and the Lamp, has
adduced an impressive amount of material to show how in the seven-
teenth century metaphor came to be connected with “the false world
of ancient superstitions, dreams, myths, terrors with which the lurid,
barbarous imaginations peopled the world, causing error and irrational-
ism and persecution.° As against metaphor, the arbitrary linguistic sign
was held up as an ideal of clarity, while to assure the status of the
arbitrarily chosen linguistic sign it was essential to deny any innate
layers of speech in man. There is no innate language, many of the
progressive thinkers claimed. Nature created man without any language,
so George Sibscota, one of the earliest students of the speech of the
dumb and deaf, maintained, and nature’s purpose in doing so was “that
he may learn them all . . .”’ In this context, Isaiah Berlin quotes Thomas
 Modern Theories of Art

Sprat, one of the founders of the Royal Society, to the effect that the
Royal Society “should avoid ‘mists and uncertainties,’ and return to ‘a
close, naked, natural way of speaking ... as near the Mathematical
Plainness as they can.’ pe
Vico was obviously aware of this attitude (though not necessarily of
the individuals who articulated it), as we can see from his polemical
remarks against the “‘philologians” who defended the arbitrariness of
the linguistic sign (444) Vico, by contrast, believed that metaphor is a
fundamental category of viewing the world. How fundamental and
irrevocable metaphor is can be seen from the fact that it is man’s innate
language, or at least essential for man’s early stage of development. Men
once thought in images rather than in concepts, and “attributed senses
and passions to bodies as vast as sky, sea and earth” (402). Thinking in
images is what Vico calls “poetic logic.” This was the pattern of
imaging, speaking, and thought in the Age of Heroes. The early stage of
mankind is similar to the early stage of individual man. The most
sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things;
and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their
hands and talk to them in plays as if they were living persons. This
philologico-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the “world’s child-
hood men were by nature sublime poets” (186-187).
In Vico’s view, a discussion of the metaphor’s origin and its nature
cannot be kept apart. Metaphors, and therefore also images, are docu-
ments of the early history of man; they must not be read as skillfully
contrived expressions of ideas essentially in contrast with, or alien to,
the structure of the expressive media. This may be the case with
arbitrary signs. In metaphor and image, so Vico keeps stressing, there is
no intrinsic tension between the content that is being conveyed and the
shape in which it is expressed, between the idea and the form. The
image is not the passive reflection of an alien form imposed by the
senses; the passive moment of “pure sensation” —which is the presup-
position of a dualistic conception of the image—is wholly lacking in
the life of the human spirit, as Vico conceives it. The image is rather
the imposition by the mind or spirit of its own form. The image is
therefore an image not of an alien object, of an external world, but of
the spirit itself. Primitive men “gave the things they wondered at
 The Early Eighteenth Century

substantial being after their own ideas” (375). The first men “created
things according to their own ideas,” and they did so “by virtue of a
wholly corporeal imagination” (376). In all these passages the notion of
“image” is not sufficiently distinct: while it always means the image we
see in our mind, it often may also mean the image carved in some kind
of material substance. How close, indeed, Vico’s concept of “image’’ is
to a work of art we can see in what he says about the origin of idolatry.
In the course of discussing “poetics” he says, basing himself on a passage
of the Church Father Lactance,’ that the first men “invented the gods”
(382). Invention, which is practically synonymous with imaging, with
“poetic” creation, is thus valid both for what the mind sees and for the
material object that can be adored.
Vico takes myths and fables seriously. They are the creations of early
human consciousness, and even if they are now dead and fossilized,
they are for us the richest source of knowing and understanding the
collective imagination of mankind. “Fables are true histories of customs”
(7), and hence “mythology is the first science to be learnt” (51). Vico is
aware of the difficulties of such a study. It may be “beyond our power
to enter into the vast imagination of these first men, whose minds were
not in the least abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were
entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the
body” (378).
Nothing tells us so much about man as his imagery of the gods. Vico
is of course concerned with the motives that caused people to create
their gods. These motives, he believes, are mainly “terror and fear”
(382). For our purpose, however, the motives are less important than
the ways in which the gods were created. What was the process by
which men imagined and shaped the gods? A great deal of the Scienza
nuova is devoted to unriddling and describing this process. “This is the
way in which the theological poets apprehended Jove, Cybele or Bere-
cynthia . . . at first mutely pointing, [they] explained them as substances
of the sky, the earth and the sea, which they imagined to be animate
divinities and were therefore true to their senses in believing them to
be gods.” But can we give to these beings a specific form? The casting
of the gods in a concrete shape Vico sees as a process of personification,
a process achieved primarily by means of the imagination. This process
 Modern Theories of Art

is actually the painter’s domain. ‘‘For when we wish to give utterance

to our understanding of spiritual things,’ ? we read in the Scienza nuova,
“Wwe must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like
painters, form human images of them” (402).
It is characteristic of primitive men as well as of children to grasp
the abstract by projecting it in a concrete form. Or, as Vico explains it,
“the first men, the children, as it were, of the human race, not being
able to form intelligible class concepts of things, had a natural need to
create poetic characters; that is, imaginative class concepts or universals,
to which, as to certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the
particular species which resembled them” (209). He complains of those
scholars who consider the origin of letters as a separate question from
that of the origin of language, “whereas the two were by nature
conjoined.” All nations, Vico believes, “began to speak by writing,” that
is, to use modern parlance, by forming concrete, visually perceptible
shapes. “ ‘Character’ . .. means idea, form, model; and certainly poetic
characters came before those of articulate sounds” (429). The intuitive
visual configuration precedes the conventionally contrived alphabet.
Considering his views on the nature and origin of letters, it seems
natural that Vico should devote serious attention to hieroglyphs. In the
Scienza nuova, hieroglyphs are frequently mentioned, and this should not
surprise a student of early eighteenth-century culture. It was precisely
in the early eighteenth century that a significant split in the traditional
interpretation of hieroglyphs was becoming manifest. On the one hand,
the traditional Neoplatonic explanation of Egyptian sacred writing was
further elaborated (especially by the followers of the great seventeenth-
century scholar Athanasius Kircher), but, on the other, these inherited,
almost sacrosanct readings were being violently attacked by the forerun-
ners of modern scientific Egyptology. Renaissance humanism, as we
know, regarded hieroglyphs as a type of secret writing, employed by
the sages of a mythical past. By using this secret script the illuminati
ensured that the divine knowledge would be transmitted to the chosen
few who, in future ages, would be worthy, and able, to decipher the
signs, and at the same time they safeguarded the message against
profanation by the undeserving. '° By Vico’s time this view was begin-
ning to be undermined. | shall here only mention Bernard de Montfau-

12
 The Early Eighteenth Century

con who, in the fifteen volumes of his L’Antiquité expliquée (17 19-1724),
not only included an enormous amount of material but also broke with
the Neoplatonic scholars of the Renaissance in his refusal to admire
Egyptian wisdom. Egyptian religion he regarded as monstrous, and
Egyptian art as horrible.'' He refused to try to interpret hieroglyphs
and even maintained that they could not be interpreted with any
accuracy. Montfaucon gave voice to a new spirit, a spirit that would be
identified with eighteenth-century rationalism. In the attitude he rep-
resents, archaeological erudition went hand in hand with sober criticism
and emotional disenchantment.
Vico seems practically untouched by the new critical spirit. He was
aware of the new approach to hieroglyphs, and in his first, juvenile
essay, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), he referred at least once to
Montfaucon, though he did not assimilate Montfaucon’s exact scholar-
ship.’ Yet intellectually he is much closer to the traditional type; his
affinity to such thinkers and scholars as Ficino, Pierio Valeriano, and
Kircher is manifest. But his view of the nature and function of hiero-
glyphs dramatically contradicts what Renaissance humanists believed
and held as undoubted truth. He vigorously attacked their central idea
about sacred and secret writing by denying that hieroglyphs were the
formulation of esoteric knowledge and wisdom. “The matchless wisdom
of the ancients, so ardently sought after from Plato to Bacon’s De
sapientia veterum”’ was no esoteric wisdom at all. ‘““Whence it will be
found . . . that all the mystic meanings of lofty philosophy attributed by
the learned to the Greek fables and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are as
impertinent as the historical meanings they both must have had are
natural”’ (384).
Students blindly following the principles and assumptions of ration-
alistic interpretation (and only such can Vico have meant when, in this
context, he spoke of “scholars””) themselves create the difficulty they
encounter in their search for the origin of letters. Their fault is analysis,
they separate spoken language from writing. By so doing, Vico is
convinced, they show that they understand neither the nature of man
nor the character of his early history. “Thus, in their hopeless ignorance
of the way in which languages and letters began, scholars have failed to
understand how the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in

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fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs” (429). The writing in hieroglyphs is

not the result of long deliberation aimed at preventing secret wisdom
from reaching the unworthy; it is rather a form of direct expression,
intuitively grasped by men who are able to contemplate ideas. So
natural is the contemplation of ideas that the language “hieroglyphic,
sacred or divine” was the first language of the Egyptians, the one
dominating the first age in history. Only after that came the language
that Vico calls “symbolic,” that is, the expression whose shape does not
fuse with the contents. Symbolic language is secondary, derived, whereas
hieroglyphic is primordial. It is endowed with universal validity, and we
find it also outside Egypt. “The divine fables of the Greeks and Latins
must have been the true first hieroglyphs, or sacred or divine characters,
corresponding to those of the Egyptians” (437).
If we disentangle what Vico says about hieroglyphs from the language
and modes of expression of his time, and translate it into modern
parlance, some conclusions would seem to impose themselves. First, the
hieroglyph is conceived as a concrete shape (or physical object) that
makes an idea manifest. Our mode of experiencing the hieroglyph is
probably best described as direct contemplation of ideas; in other
words, it is a sensuous experience of an abstract universal. That experi-
ence is not aided by any contrived symbolism. The ability to contem-
plate ideas, Vico was convinced, is innate in man. Both the creation and
the reading of the hieroglyph occurs naturally. But what is such an
object, the modern reader wonders, other than a work of art? What is
the mode of experiencing the hieroglyph, as described by Vico, but a
kind of aesthetic experience in front of a work of art? In fact, in Vico’s
doctrine the hieroglyph, though not fully identical with a picture or a
statue, comes very close to being a work of art.
A second conclusion reaches still further. Vico conceived of visual
experience (such as the contemplation of ideas as a physical act) and
creative activity in the fields of visually perceptible forms (such as
hieroglyphs) as the ways of perception and expression typical of man-
kind’s earliest stage. (The awareness of this intrinsic relationship is
reinforced by the claim that images are the natural means of expression
employed by children.) Now, visual experience and visual shapes would
also seem to include the visual arts. By firmly situating the visual arts in

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that first stage of mankind (and man), Vico anticipates an important

trend in philosophical aesthetics that came to the fore two generations
later, around the turn of the century. Philosophers of the Romantic
period who continued in the same vein (though not necessarily basing
themselves upon, or even acquainted with, Vico’s writings) made paint-
ing and sculpture the primeval arts. In their attempts to combine the
arts into a comprehensive, structured system, they made the visual arts
the most typical representatives of the earliest stages of mankind, and
considered them also the most primitive—because the most bodily and
material — of the arts.
Vico’s significance for modern thought on the arts has still another
focus. Here too he only anticipated, in broad general lines, what was
brought into the open by later generations, but he seems to have
foreshadowed certain central ideas. He was implicitly concerned not
only with the artist’s creative activity, but also with the problem of the
spectator who experiences a work of art. Once more I should emphasize
that he does not speak explicitly of experiencing a painting or a piece
of sculpture. What he has in mind is how we understand the whole
world that humans have shaped, yet obviously this also includes the
understanding of works of art. A great part of the modern attempt to
analyze and explain our experiencing of works of art seems to be
predicted in the thought of this strange Neapolitan professor of rhetoric
in the early eighteenth century.
Vico, is has recently been said, “virtually invented the concept of
understanding — of what Dilthey and others call ‘Verstehen.’ Others
before him, philologists or historians or jurists, may have had inklings
of it; Vico brings it to light.” The concept of understanding the
manmade world has many aspects altogether beyond the scope of the
present study (as, for instance, the difference between understanding
objects made by nature and those made by man); here I shall only
briefly note such features as may bear on the understanding of art.
Vico’s theory of understanding is derived from his concept of pri-
meval creation. Early gentile people, we know, “were poets who spoke
in poetic characters.” Vico himself declared this insight to be “the
master key to this Science,” that is, the Scienza nuova (34). Now, it is
these “poetic characters” that we discover and interpret when we read

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poetry or experience any other art form. We do so by virtue of a vivid

capacity for imaginative reconstruction, for conceiving the modificazioni
of the human mind, a capacity that is innate in us. We understand what
human imagination has shaped in the past by activating our own
imagination, which is as human as was that of the creators. We are
sentient beings, and we therefore have this basic understanding of
creatures who were similar to ourselves, and of what they produced.
Creative imagination plays a dominant role in human consciousness; it
is active both in the creator of a work of art and in the spectator,
reader, or listener who experiences and understands it. Obviously this
is also valid in grasping modes of feeling and expressing them.
Though little is here said explicitly about the arts, it is obvious that
Vico anticipated certain central features of the theories that attempt to
explain aesthetic experience as a process of empathy, of making the
spectator identify with what he perceives.

2. DUBOS: THE SUBLIMATION OF THE PASSIONS

The vast and complicated landscape that aesthetic thought of the early
eighteenth century offers to the modern student is extremely varied in
feature. Some of the figures (such as Vico and Shaftesbury) are rather
unusual, hard to fit into a general pattern, whether of a period or a
traditional school. But if one wishes to get a panoramic view of what
the philosophers of the time thought about our arts, it will not do to
concentrate our attention on such individual thinkers. They were out-
standing, but—at least, to some degree—they were also isolated.
Ahead of their time, they may reveal to the historian (who has the
advantage of hindsight) what their period held in store for the future,
but their impact was experienced only later: Shaftesbury’s influence is
largely felt only in the latter half of the eighteenth century, partly
through its stimulation of German philosophy; Vico’s impact becomes
discernible only in the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries.
When we ask what was the aesthetic thought dominating the first half
of the eighteenth century, how that age saw itself, we have to turn to
different authors. They may make for less fascinating (though sometimes
easier) reading than the isolated geniuses, but they reflect more clearly

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what was thought at the time itself. Authors who express a commonly
held opinion, it may be worth adding, are not necessarily devoid of
originality; in fact, I shall try to show that what they say can be new
and of great import. It is only that their originality is less that of an
individual than that of a society or culture as a whole. For reflection on
painting in the early eighteenth century, the Abbé Dubos will be a good
witness.
Is it permissible to count Dubos among the philosophers? The answer
is far from obvious. Measured by the yardstick of Descartes or Spinoza,
Dubos cannot be considered a philosopher at all. He did not try his
hand at any of the philosopher’s traditional tasks: he did not deal with
metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, or ethics. When he senses a
philosophical difficulty, it has recently been said,'* he is inclined to
shrug, or to change the subject. And yet he has been called, not
altogether without justification, “an initiator of modern thought.” Jean-
Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742), a priest (though he became Abbé only late
in life), was also a diplomatic envoy, a scholar, a writer, and a man of
letters. A prolific author, he published extensive studies in many fields
of scholarly endeavor. He was a literary critic, a theoretician of politics
and the state, and a historian of the emergence of the French monarchy.
He himself may well have seen his historical researches as the most
important part of his work. We should add here that, whatever else he
was, Dubos had no concrete experience whatsoever of art; he moved
among many people, but these were mainly scholars; his connections
with artists seem to have been nonexistent.
In the midst of his hectic diplomatic activity Dubos found time to
write a long work on aesthetics and art theory, the Réflexions critiques sur
la poésie et la peinture, appearing anonymously (as the custom was) in
1719. This book must be one of the largest works on the subject
published in the entire eighteenth century. The two volumes of the
original edition hold some 1,200 pages. Dubos’s Réflexions critiques is
certainly one of the most prominent productions in the history of
eighteenth-century art theory. Its impact may be guessed by reviewing
the many editions of the work as well as by recalling its more distin-
guished readers. During the author’s lifetime the work was reprinted
twice, and before the end of the eighteenth century it had been

1G :
 Modern Theories of Art

reprinted not less than sixteen times—no mean achievement even for
much later periods. Among the readers of the Reéflexions critiques was
Voltaire, who considered it “the most useful book ever written on this
matter in any nation.” In England the book was discussed by Edmund
Burke, the statesman and author, and by David Hume, the philosopher.
In Germany a large part of the work (the last third) was translated into
German by none other than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who also
referred to it in both his Hamburgische Dramaturgie and his Laocoén.'°
Clearly we are entitled to see in Dubos’ Réflexions critiques an important
representative of a central trend in early eighteenth-century thought on
the arts.
A careful reader of the Réflexions critiques cannot escape sensing a
strong contradiction pervading the work. On the one hand, Dubos’s
style of thought and manner of presentation are altogether traditional.
There are the references to Pliny and Quintilian (sometimes without
quoting the names), unavoidable in art literature for many centuries
before our author wrote his book; there are the equally unavoidable
references to the authority of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient authors
(particularly Plutarch); and there are, of course, the inevitable compari-
sons of literature and painting that form part of the great Horatian
tradition in European letters. For Dubos these features are more than
just a matter of external form; they indicate his sources as well as his
commitment to the humanistic tradition that had dominated European
thought since the Renaissance. These features also show the modern
historian what in fact was Dubos’s frame of reference in matters of
aesthetic concepts and doctrines. When one gets behind this curtain,
however, one encounters themes, opinions, and ideas that do not belong
to the humanistic tradition, and sometimes clash with its fundamental
beliefs and its spirit. Dubos himself may well have felt this contradic-
tion. Several times he seems to make the attempt to harmonize the
component parts of his doctrine. That he does not succeed can hardly
surprise the historian; the conflict of various elements in his theory may
be seen as a hallmark of an author who is the spokesman of a transi-
tional period. Dubos was such a one.
In attempting to discuss these conflicts we should remember, first,
that in the Réflexions critiques Dubos does not deal with comprehensive

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ideas of aesthetics; on the contrary, he is altogether committed to the

analysis of two individual, specific arts, poetry and painting. As we shall
presently see, he is not primarily concerned with what the two arts
have in common (that is, with the major theme of the Horatian ut
pictura poesis) but rather with what makes each of them different from
the other and thus unique. No wonder, then, that he devotes a great
deal of attention to what we would now call the “medium”? of each art,
to its particular structures and effects, and had in fact more to say
about this subject than most of his predecessors. In concentrating on
the particular arts—rather than on the general aesthetics that was in
the air— Dubos followed the traditional type of art theory. In spite of
all this, however, his point of departure differs from that of traditional
art theory. It is not the performance of the artist’s job that occupies his
mind; the workshop experience, and the practical tasks emerging from
it, are not part of his background. His basic theme is the audience. For
our purpose, it is the spectator who looks at a painting. The question
underlying Dubos’s whole doctrine is how the spectator experiences
the work of art.
The spectator—and in a broader sense, the audience in general—
did not invade art theory all of a sudden. That artists were always
aware, though in different ways and to varying degrees, of the spectator
and reflected on him is a truism that need not be belabored here. At
least since the teachers of ancient rhetoric had urged the orator always
to have his audience in mind, the public was, implicitly or more overtly,
present in the theories of the various arts. We have seen that in the
Renaissance, with the full evolution of art literature, the spectator
became a factor openly determining theories of painting. In the six-
teenth century, “art theory,’ ’ instead of being exclusively a theory for
the artist with the aim of instructing him in his work, became a branch
of literature that explained the work of art, and possibly also its
production, to nonartists, to the general public.'® But all this was
undertaken from the artist’s point of view. Even when the general
public was addressed, the authors of art theoretical treatises always had
the artist’s task in mind. The question behind all their efforts can be
stated as follows: what do I, the creative artist, do, what do I have to
know, and what means must I employ to represent nature (or any other

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subject) appropriately and to reach my audience and evoke its proper

response?
In Dubos’s work this is radically changed. The artist’s needs have
receded; they seem to have disappeared as the principal subject matter,
or as the leading question, of art theory. What is now asked is: how
and why does the spectator enjoy the work of art he is looking at (or
the poem he is reading)? By placing the spectator at the center of his
analysis Dubos is anticipating a large part of the modern discussion of
what is now called “aesthetic experience” as an independent and
important subject matter in philosophical thought. The spectator as the
point of departure for all reflections determines the structure of Du-
bos’s doctrine in the same way that the spectator dominates a great
deal of modern thought on the arts.
Dubos actually begins his Réflexions critiques with an analysis of the
spectator. In a brief introduction—a text that bears the clear imprint
of a somewhat simplistic Enlightenment philosophy—he explains the
function and significance of the arts as derived from a general concept
of man’s nature. Man, he claims, experiences pleasure only when he is
satisfying a need. One human need is to keep our minds busy. Boredom,
resulting from not occupying our minds, may lead to difficult and
dangerous situations. “Boredom is so painful that a man will frequently
undertake the most exhausting labors to spare himself this torment.”
The need, or desire, to keep our minds and souls occupied is the reason
for our being so profoundly attracted by spectacles of all kinds, partic-
ularly by those evoking powerful emotions. “In all countries,” says
Dubos, “people will go to watch the most horrible spectacles,” such as
the condemned being led to the gallows. This leaning of human nature
is also the reason why the Romans invented the fight between gladiators
and turned it into a spectacle. Nor do such cruel “performances” belong
to the past only. A bullfight may seem less perturbing or inflammatory
than a fight between gladiators, but it is also dangerous; many a
bullfighter has lost his life while combating the furious beast. And yet
“Spaniards of all walks of life watch these dangerous displays.” '” In
these words, Dubos echoes— possibly without being aware of it—the
Church Fathers’ strong rejection of the arena. It is enough to think of

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Tertullian’s passionate invective against the circus, |® or of St. Augus-

tine’s fascinating description of a huge audience in the arena held in the
grip of mass hysteria. But Dubos knows that the danger of being carried
away by passions is universal. “The allure of the emotions makes the
most good-hearted of nations forget the first principles of humanity.”
It is here that art comes in. From the human condition just de-
scribed, from that danger caused by emotions, Dubos derives the
function of art. “Could not art,” he asks, “find a way to forestall the
evil consequences which most pleasant passions bear with them? Could
it not produce objects which would arouse artificial passions capable of
occupying us for the moment, but not involving any real suffering or
emotion?” And he answers: “Poetry and painting have achieved this
objective.”'? How does art achieve this end? I should like, first, to
present Dubos’ views on the subject, and, second, to make some brief
observations on the historical significance of his views and on the
meaning of some of the terms he employs.
To successfully forestall the evil consequences of the passions— this
is the cornerstone of Dubos’ psychology of the beholder—we would
have to have ‘“‘a means of separating the evil consequences of most of
the passions from those [effects] that are agreeable.” There is such a
means, Dubos believes, and it is what he calls the “artificial passions.”
The lord and master of “artificial passions” is the artist. “The painter
and poet excite in us these artificial passions by presenting to us
imitations of the objects that are capable of exciting our real pas-
sions.”°°
So far Dubos seems to follow the traditional pattern. That we
understand a work of art by empathy, and that the artist’s task is to
evoke our emotions, were ideas accepted since Alberti’s On Painting of
1435. But in the whole tradition from the early Renaissance to the
seventeenth century it was also accepted that the emotions the painting
evoked were the very same that the object depicted would have evoked.
This was the power and the danger inherent in images. Here Dubos
introduces an important transformation. The “artificial passion” is not
only artificially evoked (by a representation instead of by the figure or
object itself), it is a weakened, paler passion, manageable precisely

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because it lacks the vigor and power of the passion in its full strength.
“Artificial passions” are passions of a different degree, and maybe of a
different sort, than real ones.
Let us mention a single example, one that Dubos himself adduces.
To show that “artificial passions” differ from real ones, our author
describes a famous painting by Charles Lebrun, the president of the
Academy of Art in Paris who played such an important part in formu-
lating the academic ideology that art aimed at moving the beholder.*!
The painting is The Massacre of the Innocents, and Dubos, at the beginning
of his Réflexions critiques, discusses its impact on the beholder. In that
great canvas, we see terrible scenes, such as “the frantic soldiers cutting
the throats of the children in the laps of their bleeding mothers.” Yet
Le Brun’s painting, where we see the rendering of this tragic event, so
Dubos continues, “disturbs us and moves us, but it leaves no trouble-
some idea in our soul: this painting excites our compassion without
really afflicting us.” A few lines later, Dubos uses this vivid metaphor:
“The affliction is, as it were, only on the surface of our heart.”*?
We shall presently come back to the question of why the emotions
evoked by a work of art are mild and weakened—harmless, if I may
say so—, and shall now ask: what kind of emotion does the spectator
feel when looking at a work of art? The answer would seem to be as
clear as it is new: the emotion prevailing when we look at a work of art
is simply pleasure. To put it crudely, Dubos comes close to describing
art as entertainment. Let us listen to his somewhat elevated language:
“The pleasure one feels in looking at the imitations that painters and
poets know how to make of objects that are apt to evoke in us passions
had they been presented to us in reality is a pure pleasure.” 4
One can hardly exaggerate the revolutionary nature of Dubos’s
notion. To appreciate how new his ideas were and how profoundly they
upset an old and firmly established traditional view, one should keep in
mind that throughout European history there were constantly recurring
attempts to provide a comprehensive “justification” of the arts, and
particularly a vindication of painting and sculpture. Such conceptual
vindications naturally also determined views on the specific functions of
the arts and on the kind of job the artist should perform. An exhaustive

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presentation of these attempts would fill another volume. Here it will

suffice to recall a truism, namely, that the great world views at different
periods tried to justify art, and to determine its function, according to
their own needs and beliefs. As an example, we may recall the attempts
made in the Middle Ages to make art serve religious ends by leading
the spectator’s mind “‘upwards.” Another fully articulate medieval at-
tempt to justify the art of painting was, as we know, to consider images
as a ‘‘script of the illiterate,” that is, to make the didactic function the
basis of art. To be sure, modern scholars, particularly Meyer Schapiro,
have shown that in medieval testimonies we also encounter the expres-
sion of sheer joy experienced in looking at precious and beautiful
artifacts. But even where such experiences are recorded, the explicit
aim of art is not seen as one of giving pleasure.
In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the urge to justify art by
relating it to some central value it supposedly served (and which
differed from art itself) was even intensified. In the fifteenth century,
the belief prevailed that one of the main values art served was discov-
ering the truth and understanding the world of nature; the work of art
contains, or leads us to, a scientific cognition of the world. In the
sixteenth century, particularly in the Counter-Reformation, painting
was often justified on the ground that it provided a powerful stimulus
to the emotions, and could thus be employed to intensify religious
experiences and beliefs. Art could also be considered as containing the
formulation of some ancient wisdom or as reflecting a primary layer in
our nature. How strong this view was we can infer from Vico who, as
we have seen, held and even further developed it. Even when in the
seventeenth century Nicolas Poussin declared delectation to be the “aim”
of painting, this term still carried, as we have tried to show, some
metaphysical or even mystical connotation.”
What all the justifications listed —and the many others that might
be mentioned—have in common is the belief that art is a means of
achieving some noble, elevated aim, that it is often employed to come
closer to some redemptive end. There is a heroic air about art that does
not derive purely from the art itself. In most periods there would have
been agreement that a picture, a statue, or some other kind of precious

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artifact could also delight the spectator, but before the eighteenth
century the pleasure derived from looking at such a work would have
been considered only a by-product of a striving towards a nobler aim.
After having reviewed this awe-inspiring background of two millen-
nia of continuing reflection associating art with the highest of values,
one reads Dubos’ definition of the aim of painting and poetry with
disappointment. What the work of art gives us, he claims, is nothing
but pleasure, or “pure pleasure,” as he puts it. The dignity with which
art was endowed by making it a road to great aims seems to be dwarfed
here. If the secular is conceived as being of a lower status than the
sacred, then Dubos may be said to introduce a secularization in our
seeing of art.
It may be worthwhile here to pause for a moment, to direct our
glance ahead instead of backwards, and to ask what “pure pleasure”
may actually mean. Let me put it in the simplest and crudest way: of
what has the pleasure we experience in looking at a beautiful picture
been purified? Unfortunately we cannot learn much from Dubos’s text.
He speaks of “pure pleasure” only at the beginning of the Réflexions
critiques; he never defines that notion, perhaps because he thought it
self-evident. Keeping in mind how new the concept was, one can well
understand that he had difficulties in defining it, or that he may even
not have been aware of what it implied. But for us, aided by what the
centuries have in the meantime made clear, it is possible to reconstruct
its original meaning, perhaps even beyond what Dubos himself was
aware of. Now, the only answer to the question that offers itself is that
the “pleasure” we are speaking of has been purified of anything that
transcends the experience of looking at the picture. In looking at the
painting and enjoying it we are not concerned with the redemption of
our soul, or with the cognition of the world, or with the intensification
and orientation of our emotions. Our experience in front of the work
of art is free from any aim or consideration outside the aesthetic
experience itself. One cannot help feeling that we have here an early
formulation of the idea that, eighty years later, Kant was to call
“disinterested pleasure” (interesseloses Wohlgefallen), making it the corner-
stone of any modern theory of aesthetic experience.

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

In addition to causing “pure pleasure,” for Dubos painting and

poetry fulfil yet another function. As we just saw, art removes the
danger from emotions. How can art achieve this end? What is there in
their very nature that makes it possible for painting and poetry to
perform this task? The passions, we remember, are made harmless by
draining the intensity out of them. Dubos does not doubt that in the
process the nature of the particular emotion remains manifest; we know
that it is pity or terror or joy that we are experiencing before the
picture evoking these passions, but their intensity is so reduced that we
are not in danger of being carried away by them. They are quasi-
passions. In Dubos’s psychology, the “artificial passion” is a quasi-
passion, an “‘as if”’ passion.
Now, it is one of our author’s most original ideas that he links the
illusionary reality created by art with the unreal nature of the “artificial
passion.” The semipassions we experience when we are looking at a
work of art or reading a poem have something in common with the
semireality of artistic portrayal. The pictorial representation of a natural
object is a “copy” of that object, and copies obey a law of their own:
they are always less powerful than the object they are imitating. Dubos
quotes Quintilian to the effect that “everything that is the resemblance
of something else must necessarily be inferior to that of which it is a
copy.” ?° Dubos quoted only the first half of Quintilian’s sentence. The
other half reads: ‘as the shadow is to the substance, the portrait to the
natural face, and the acting of the player to the real feeling.” But
although Dubos did not quote the latter half of the sentence, the idea
expressed in it is incorporated in his thought. Art is a shadow of reality.
“Even the most perfect imitation,” Dubos explains at the beginning of
the Réflexions critiques, “is nothing but an artificial being, it has but a
borrowed life, while the power and activity of nature dwell in the
object that is imitated.”*°
But as the “copy” of a real object made by the artist is a quasi-
object, so the emotion evoked by it, that is, the “artificial passion,” is a
copy of the real passion, a quasi-passion. It is precisely as quasi-passions
that the emotions are less dangerous than the actual passions, those
encountered in real life. The particular nature of the artistic world—

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that world of semi-reality—transmits itself to the passions, purges

them of the dangerous drives normally inherent in them, and makes
them manageable.
In speaking of “quasi-reality” or “‘illusionary reality,’ ») we should be
careful not to confound what Dubos has in mind when he uses these
terms with what they have now come to mean. The creation of an
illusion has, of course, for centuries been considered the aim of painting,
success in creating such an illusion being one of the highest forms of
praise for a work of art. A perfect illusion, it has been said in various
formulations, is achieved when the spectator is deceived into taking the
artistic representation of reality for reality itself. So deeply rooted and
long-lived was this view that literary topoi developed to illustrate it. In
antiquity and since the early Renaissance, art literature has told and
retold the stories of the sparrows picking at painted grapes, and of the
ancient painter who lost a contest because he tried to pull a curtain
that his competitor painted on the wall. Whether or not the art of the
different periods supported this theory, one believed or at least paid lip
service to the dogma that deceiving the senses, creating the perfect
illusion, was the summit of the painter’s art. The question that was
asked, explicitly or implicitly, was how to achieve the mastery of means
that would make it possible for the artist to delude the spectator’s eye.
Here, too, Dubos turned away from established traditions. He did
not go on asking, as had been done for centuries, how to achieve such
deception; rather he made it questionable whether it was desirable to
create a perfect illusion of reality in a work of art. He deals directly
with the problem quite briefly, devoting only a single, rather short
chapter to it. However, it is not difficult to infer from his general
system that he would consider a perfect illusion undesirable. He knows
the critical tradition, and he rejects it. Intelligent people have believed,
he tells his readers, “that illusion is the first cause of the pleasure that
spectacles and paintings give us.”*” This opinion he altogether rejects.
The function of art, as we remember, is the purgation of the emotions,
and this end is achieved by presenting images (or spectacles) that are
clearly recognizable, yet devoid of full immediacy. Were the picture so
to deceive the spectator that he mistook the artist’s representation for
the figure or subject represented, he would react as if to the real scene.

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What would then be the value of art? The achieving of total illusion
would negate everything art stands for.
Interestingly enough, Dubos discusses illusion not in the context of
the two arts to which his book is dedicated, poetry and painting, but
rather in conjunction with the theater. Here he suggests a crucial
distinction, that between being moved by what we watch and being
misled by an illusion into believing we are witnessing reality itself. The
distinction is not explicitly stated, but it emerges with sufficient clarity
from the context. “It is true that all we see in the theater converges
towards us,” Dubos says, “but nothing produces an illusion to our
mind, because everything reveals itself as an imitation.”7 We are
moved by what we are watching on stage, but we do not believe that
we are watching a tragedy in real life. We look around in the theater,
we know that what we are seeing is only a play, and yet we continue
to derive pleasure from the experience.
What is true for the theater is also valid for painting. Dubos reminds
his readers of Raphael’s famous fresco in the Stanza d’Eliodoro, the
Expulsion of Attila:
The picture of Attila painted by Raphael does not derive its merits from its
imposing itself upon us in order to seduce us, and make us believe that we
truly see St. Peter and St. Paul hovering in the air, and, sword in hand,
threatening that barbarian king who is surrounded by troops urging him to
sack Rome. But in the painting of which I speak Attila ingenuously represents
a frightened Scyth; Pope Leo who explains the vision to him displays a noble
confidence, and a demeanor appropriate to his dignity; all the participants (the
other figures) look like people whom we would meet under the circumstances
Raphael assigned to the different figures, even the horses contribute to the
principal action. The imitation is so likely that, to a large extent, it makes the
impression the actual event would have made on them.??

That the spectator’s senses are not deluded does not mean that the
picture lacks expression. We know quite well that what we are looking
at is only a picture, an artistic rendering, yet the emotions expressed in
the figures affect us, we are moved by them. The expressive effect of a
work of art, then, does not depend on the rather primitive belief that
we are witnessing the actual event.
The rejection of the trompe l'oeil should by no means be taken to

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imply a disregard for the specific nature of each individual art. On the
contrary, in the Réflexions critiques Dubos is not concerned with general
notions of aesthetics, nor does “art” in general attract his thought; he
is concerned with the specific, unique character and conditions of
painting and poetry, and he shows a real ability to discriminate what is
and is not possible in one or the other of these arts. Dubos’s presenta-
tion and his thought are far from consistent; in the analysis of each art
there are many digressions and even contradictions. Yet the major lines
of his reasoning emerge quite clearly. In the following brief survey, |
shall disregard the inconsistencies in an attempt to present Dubos’
views as simply as possible.
Dubos constantly compares painting and poetry; even where he
discusses each art separately, he does so in comparative terms. As |
have already suggested earlier in this section, his leaning is to separate
one art from the other, to actively oppose them, and thus to bring out
what is unique and unparalleled in each rather than what they have in
common.
The difference between poetry and painting is not merely a technical
one, based on material. The two arts are rooted in two different
dimensions of human experience: the art of poetry (and literature in
general) materializes in a temporal sequence, painting (and the visual
arts in general) in a timeless presence. Considering these basic data, one
understands the limitations of each art as well as the power residing in
each separately. The painter and the poet should be aware of these
limitations, and they should choose their subjects according to what
they can achieve within limits they cannot change.
That painting depicts only a single moment, one stage of an action
that is detached from what has gone before and from what will come
afterwards, whereas poetry describes a succession of events taking place
in time— this, of course, is not a new idea. Even if one considers only
Dubos’s immediate predecessors in the theory of the visual arts, like
testimonies abound. André Félibien, in his Entretiens sur la vie et sur les
ouvrages des plus excellents peintres (1685), expressed this idea, and, a few
years after the publication of Dubos’s work, it attained a classic formu-
lation in Lessing’s Laocoén (1766).°° Dubos’s formulation, even though
not fully consistent, is clear enough. “‘As the painting that represents an

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action does not show more than an instance of its (the action’s)
duration” —so he begins the discussion of whether the painter is able
to appropriately portray the sublime. It is in the nature of the sublime,
we understand from what Dubos says, that events that happened in the
past may shed important light on the present, that they may endow
regular objects, figures, or situations with a particular significance and
make them into what they now are. This complex but essential relation-
ship between the past and the present the painter is unable to make
visible. He can only show what is present, not what was in the past.
Poetry, on the other hand, describes all the stages and events that are
significant for the action or theme the poet relates. Poussin, in the Death
of Germanicus, could represent the different kinds of suffering and
affliction that beset the relatives and friends of the dying hero, but he
was unable to show the hero’s last feelings, the thoughts that crossed
his dying mind.*! A poet can do precisely this, and what he does will
affect the spectator. A tragedy, Dubos says, includes fifty pictures. The
playwright presents us, successively as it were, with fifty pictures, and
they lead us, step by step, to that extreme emotion that makes us shed
tears.
Dubos mentions still another limitation of painting, one that scholars
do not seem to have noticed. To put it in modern parlance: the amount
of new information the painter is able to supply to the spectator is
limited. To be intelligible, the painter must employ figures his spectators
already know; he has no means of providing them with fresh informa-
tion, of telling them what is so far unknown to them. In Poussin’s Death
of Germanicus, a female figure, placed next to the dying hero, covers her
face with her hands, an expression of grief that surpasses the sorrow
expressed by all the other figures. “Those who know,” Dubos draws
the conclusion from what he has said before, ‘‘that Germanicus had a
wife uniquely attached to him, and who received his last breath, as
surely recognize her as Agrippina as the antiquarians identify her by her
hairdo.” But what about those spectators who do not know the story?
Will they be able to read the picture appropriately? Even if Dubos did
not mention those spectators who are ignorant of the stories and
meanings the artist suggests in his work, the modern student cannot
forget them. What emerges from Dubos’s theory is that painting cannot

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teach the spectator what he does not know already. ““To move us, he
(the painter) is confined to availing himself of figures we already know.”
Painters themselves have felt their inferiority to the poets in this
respect. This is shown by their use of inscriptions in paintings. Whether
they used inscribed banderols, as did the Gothic painters, or found
other forms, as have certain artists, they had to rely on the written
word, even in pictures.’ 2
But painting has also its strengths. Even in the field of providing
information, though generally inferior to the spoken or written word,
the visual arts have some advantages over literature. The painter can
provide a great deal of information at one and the same time, without
being subject to the tedious succession by which the individual bits of
information are transmitted in literature. “Nothing is easier to the
intelligent painter,” Dubos points out, “than to make us grasp the age,
the temperament, the sex, the profession, and even the homeland of his
figures, by using the dress, the color of flesh, of the beard and hair,
their length and thickness as well as their natural movement, the habit
of the body, of the face, the shape of the head, the physiognomy, the
movements, the color of the eyes, and several other things that make
the character of a figure recognizable.” ** All this the painter gives at
once, in one cluster, as it were, while the poet must break up the data
into individual pieces of information, not without “annoying detail,” as
Dubos has it. Music altogether lacks the ability to provide information.*°
Another feature of painting is more important than its ability to
provide information. Here one would wish Dubos to be more consis-
tent, and more articulate on certain issues, but one cannot deny that
what he has to say leads us, stumblingly perhaps, into the future. In
comparing the two arts, Dubos emphasizes that painting is closer to
nature than poetry is. “I believe that the power of painting over men is
greater than that of poetry, and I support my feeling by two reasons.
The first is that painting acts upon us by the sense of vision. The second
is that painting does not employ artificial signs, as does poetry, but uses
natural signs.” *° The concept of “sign” in the context of the arts has a
definitely modern ring, even though it is doubtful whether what Dubos
meant by this term exactly corresponds to its meaning in modern
thought. What Dubos surely meant by it is that in poetry there is an

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unbridgeable gap between the object described and the means employed
to describe it. Whatever poetry relates or expresses—heroic deeds or
tender love, profound melancholy or exuberant joy—the words by
which the acts or sentiments are described are altogether alien to these
contents. In relation to what it describes, we can say, the word is an
“artificial” or an “arbitrary sign.” *7
Painting, on the other hand, does not address the beholder by
artificial means or arbitrary signs. “The signs that painting employs in
order to speak to us are not arbitrary or prescribed signs, as are the
signs poetry employs. Painting employs natural signs.” But Dubos
quickly corrects himself. “I may express myself badly,” he admits,
“when I say that painting employs signs: it is Nature herself that
Painting is placing before our eyes.” This is the power of painting.
“Painting has the advantage that it can place before our eyes the very
incidents of the actions of which it treats.”** Painting, then, does not
employ signs at all. But what can this mean but that the gap between
the reality represented and the means employed in representing it, the
gap Dubos found so characteristic of poetry, is here eliminated? In other
words, that in painting reality and representation in some exceptional
way merge with one another?
The skeptical critic may ask how this assertion, so central to Dubos’s
characterization of the individual arts, accords with another statement,
not less crucial for his doctrine of art in general, namely, that art should
not be confounded with nature itself, that it achieves its end—to
create “artificial passions” —precisely because there always remains a
distance that cannot be bridged between raw nature and its artistic
portrayal. But it is not our task to criticize or to find fault with Dubos’s
reasoning; we want to understand what he is saying and what attitude
he is expressing. If that attitude contains contradictions, they are not
less a part of his doctrine than those parts that seem to us consistent.
Perhaps because what we see is so much closer to reality than what
we hear in a description (when it is transformed into the arbitrary signs
of words), the sense of sight is more powerful than the sense of hearing.
“One can say, metaphorically speaking, that the eye is closer to our
soul than the ear.’ It was not the story of Caesar’s assassination that
filled the people of Rome with terror and indignation, but “the sight of

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the bloody robe that was displayed.”*° Dubos quotes Quintilian to

testify to the power of the eye upon the soul. Images, that venerated
teacher of rhetoric believed, when “so distinctly represented to the
mind that we seem to see them with our eyes, and to have them before
us,” are powerful in the stirring of the emotions. Therefore, “whoever
shall best conceive such images, will have the greatest power in moving
the feelings.” *' But once more, the modern critic remembers that the
emotions Quintilian has in mind are not “purified emotions,” they are
not “artificial passions,” to use Dubos’s terms; rather they are the real
passions, not mitigated by an aesthetic distance. If an author of the
sixteenth or seventeenth century had quoted these passages by Quinti-
lian, he would not have doubted that the orator wished to stir the real
passions. That Dubos should quote precisely these sentences shows yet
again how the old and the new, the traditional and the revolutionary,
coexist in his thought. Though he quotes the advice on how to stir real
passion, what he ultimately aims at is the experience of aesthetic
pleasure.
Dubos’s historical position becomes even more manifest in yet an-
other aspect, the characterization of the two arts and the analysis of
their relationship. Let us for a moment leave our author and the early
eighteenth century, and remember that in European thought there were
two different yet articulate traditions of comparing the arts. One of
these found its fullest expression in what is known as the paragone
literature; the other became famous under the Horatian dictum ut
pictura poesis. Both traditions originated in Antiquity, were revitalized in
the Renaissance, and have remained a living force ever since. The
debates known under the title of paragone developed largely in the
workshops; it is characteristic of them that they compare all the arts,
with the intention of defining what is unique in each and thus distin-
guishing it from all the others. If we are to judge by the best-known
representative of the paragone literature in the Italian Renaissance,
Leonardo da Vinci, the arts most frequently compared and juxtaposed
to each other are painting and sculpture; music comes next, and poetry
plays only a minor part. The Horatian tradition is to emphasize what
the two arts have in common; the differences between them are often
treated as if they were of only marginal significance. Painting, Plutarch’s

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saying is endlessly echoed, is mute poetry, poetry is loquacious painting.

It is one art, realized in different media.*?
For Dubos, a literary scholar raised in the tradition of classical
learning, it was natural to adopt the Horatian model, and this is indeed
the conceptual framework of his comparisons of the arts. His great
work, the Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, already betrays
in its title the author’s allegiance to the Horatian tradition: it singles
out painting and poetry, the two arts that Horace compares. In the text
itself Dubos keeps referring to the authorities of humanism: he quotes
Cicero and Quintilian, and he refers to Pliny, Vergil, and Horace. The
views he expresses, however, often plainly contradict the credo of the
Horatian tradition. Dubos shows, as we have seen, that painting and
poetry essentially differ from each other, that they are rooted in
different dimensions of the human experience, and that their respective
structures are subject to altogether different laws. Dubos’s main empha-
sis is on what we would today call the awareness of the medium. It is
worth our attention that this happens not in the workshop of the
practicing artist, but in the writings of an educated literary man.
Perhaps nowhere do Dubos’s new and revolutionary ideas manifest
themselves more clearly than in his discussion of allegory in painting.
At least since the Renaissance, allegory (in literal translation: saying
something else) has occupied an important place in theoretical reflec-
tions on the arts. Not only were countless allegorical paintings and
sculptures produced and displayed, but there emerged a considerable
literature meant to assist the artist in the shaping of allegories, and the
audience in correctly reading them.*? Allegorical paintings and sculp-
tures were most highly regarded, and allegory was considered a noble
and learned art form. Seen against this background, it is highly remark-
able that Dubos should have directly attacked allegory in painting. The
chapter in the Réflexions critiques devoted to this subject is an important
document of a changing mentality, and it deserves more careful atten-
tion than it has received so far.
An allegory, so Dubos defines the time-honored concept from his
own point of view, is an action that has never taken place or a figure
that has never existed.** The painter who produces an_ allegorical
composition knows quite well that he is depicting something that is not

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and has never been part of reality. Dubos discusses individual allegorical
figures and whole allegorical scenes separately. Individual allegorical
figures consist of two types: those invented a long time ago, and those
the artist invents as he goes along in order to express his personal ideas.
The first type—those figures that form part of the inherited culture, as
we would say today—has “acquired citizenship, as it were, among
human beings.” *° France represented as a woman, the crown firmly on
her head, the scepter in her hand, her figure covered in a blue mantle
with golden fleurs-de-lis, or the “Tiber” rendered as a recumbent, half
propped-up male figure, with a she-wolf at his feet: these are allegorical
figures everybody knows and easily recognizes in artistic imagery. Be-
cause they are known, the artist is permitted to place Harpocrates, the
god of silence, or Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, next to the portrait
of a prince, thus suggesting his circumspection and his prudence.
The other type of allegorical figure consists of images that are not
inherited, and therefore are not common knowledge; the artist invents
them as he works. How can the spectator grasp these personal symbols?
Indeed, they remain unintelligible. They are, says Dubos, like “ciphers
to which nobody has the key, not even those who search for igs
Complete allegorical compositions are also of two kinds, those that
are wholly invented, and historical scenes to which some allegorical
parts are added. We shall comment briefly only on those that are
wholly invented. “It is rare that painters succeed in purely allegorical
compositions,” Dubos assures his readers.*’ Why should this be so? The
answer, according to our author, is simple. Purely allegorical scenes are
obscure and opaque; the spectator, confused by unintelligible figures
and attributes, cannot make out the meaning of what he sees. “In
compositions of this kind it is almost impossible to make their subject
matter distinctly recognizable, and to make their ideas available even to
the most intelligent spectators.” Being unintelligible, they will not move
the beholder,*® and will thus fail in what is the painter’s central task
and the justification of any work of art. The painting of allegories is a
trap endangering the artist in his work. “I dare say,” the learned abbé
says, “that nothing more often prevents painters from achieving the
true aim of their art ... than their desire to be applauded for the
subtlety of their imagination, that is, of their mind.” The subtlety of

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imagination, as reflected in intricate allegories, is not the artist’s true

calling nor is it the true value of the work of art. It is the expression of
emotions that remains the painter’s end. “Instead of sticking to the
imitation of the passions, they [the painters of allegories] surrender to
the efforts of a capricious imagination, and to the forging of idle fancies,
amongst which mysterious allegory is an enigma more obscure than
ever were those of the Sphinx.” * The painter’s task, he says a little
later, is not to exercise our imagination by confronting us with entan-
gled subjects we are called upon to unravel; the artist’s task is to move
us. Therefore Dubos condemns the artists who, “instead of speaking to
us in the language of passions, common to all men, speak in a language
they have invented themselves.”
Dubos was not alone in his age in rejecting allegory. Eighteenth-
century thought was largely dominated bya lasting, sustained endeavor
to properly understand, and to pass judgment on, allegory, its use and
impact on different fields of creative activity. The modern student of
that century is therefore forced to return frequently to this subject. In
his attitude toward allegory Dubos may well have been inspired by
Pierre Bayle, the great philosopher of the French Enlightenment. Our
author was an admirer of Bayle’s work; he studied it, and was influ-
enced by Bayle in different ways (including the exchange of letters).°°
Pierre Bayle severely criticized allegorical explanations of religion, a
type of explanation that was largely inherited from Renaissance human-
ism. He was determined to destroy the last vestiges of Renaissance
allegorism and to that end condemned the religions of Greece and
Rome by the ugly accusation of their barbaric worship of cats, dogs,
serpents, and other disgusting objects.”"
In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the criticism of
allegory did not apply to the visual arts. Here Dubos opens up a
discussion that, in various and ever changing forms, was to last till our
own days. For the present purpose, it is of particular significance to us
to recognize not only the fact that Dubos rejected allegory in painting
but his reasons for doing so. In effect, he adduces one basic reason: the
uninitiated spectator will not be able to understand the allegorical
painting, and will therefore not be moved by what he sees. It is the
spectator who remains the ultimate judge of the work of art, and, as

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 Modern Theories of Art

has been said at the beginning of this section, he is the central axis of
Dubos’ theory of art. What he says about allegory in painting, as about
several other specific questions, only reveals additional aspects of that
central belief.

3. SHAFTESBURY

The modern mentality, destined to overturn so much of what for

centuries had seemed firm and solid truth in matters of taste and the
arts, was originally so deeply embedded in inherited traditions that,
even with the advantage of hindsight, we. can hardly distinguish it from
what was still a remnant of the past. At the turn of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, that major wellspring of Western tradition, Neo-
platonism, once more inspired a new approach to the arts and infused
aesthetic reflection with new life. This version of Platonism, to be sure,
was quite far removed from Plato’s original doctrine and even from the
idea of his latter-day followers in late Antiquity and the Renaissance.
Within the framework of this loose Platonism we can observe how,
around 1700, some specifically modern notions and attitudes took shape.
The Platonism of that period is best represented by Shaftesbury.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671~1715),
like so many of the great minds of his time, was not a systematic
thinker. His important contribution to theoretical reflection on the arts
consists less in well-formulated doctrines than in the very fact that he
raised, and invigorated, certain lines of thought, often without carrying
them to final formulation. Shaftesbury was personally linked with some
of the major trends in European thought. Educated in the English
deistic tradition, to which he remained true in a special way, he was
associated with the early Enlightenment, particularly with Pierre Bayle,
whom he frequently met when they were both in Amsterdam. He was
a citizen of the early eighteenth-century republic of letters, but always
a very unusual and original one. In both capacities, as a representative
of early Enlightenment thinking and as a highly individual man of
letters, he exercised a major influence on the thought of his time.”
Shaftesbury’s contributions to the theory of art and artists, particu-
larly his ideas about creativity (human and divine), are obscured by

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appearing in a context of moral speculation. This was so in his time,

and remains so even today. In the eighteenth century the impact of
what he had to say about aesthetic matters was not felt among living
artists. His influence on the philosophy of the century was profound,
Kant’s doctrine of the aesthetic experience, it has been said, was
stimulated by his ideas, but in the workshops and academies of art
nobody knew his name. This is perhaps less surprising than it may seem
at first. It is doubtful whether Shaftesbury had an actual theory of
painting and sculpture; what he occasionally has to say about a picture
or about a painter’s or sculptor’s subject sounds rather conventional,
and hardly suggests any original departure from accepted generalities.
His invigorating influence on the thought of art flows from a different
source. What he says about nature in general, and about landscapes in
particular, sometimes displays a surprising affinity to art and an under-
standing of artistic processes. Whoever tries to understand Shaftesbury’s
view of art and his formative impact on modern aesthetics must grasp
the character of his thought as a whole rather than focus on specific
details in his doctrine.
An insight into the aesthetic aspect of Shaftesbury’s combination of
Platonic idealism and psychological intuitionism affords us his vision of
the world as a work of art created by God. A perfect relationship
between the parts and the whole is characteristic of the world, and it
has an artistic character. Shaftesbury uses many terms to designate this
relationship, such as “the whole,” “the One,” and “unity of design,”
but the most important one is “harmony.” Harmony, the highest value,
is achieved in the universe as a whole. In a sentence that could have
been written by St. Augustine, he says: “In the real Cosmos the whole
is harmony, the numbers entire, the music perfect.” That cosmic
harmony is both static (as the perfect balance fully achieved) and
dynamic (as the inborn striving to achieve that perfect balance). Shaftes-
bury emphasizes the dynamic quality of the cosmic harmony. The
universe is not a machine but an animated organism of forms; it is, in
his words, a “conspiring beauty.” ° ;
Similar ideas, it need hardly be stressed, are commonplace in the
Platonic tradition. As a rule, harmony was seen as static; often it was
considered the very basis of stability. A dynamic view of harmony,

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though never altogether absent in the Platonic tradition, became more

prominent only in the late Renaissance. As always, then too dynamism
entailed a certain intrinisic tension, as has been shown with much
learning by Leo Spitzer in his Classical and Christian Ideas of World Har-
mony. jathe interpenetration of cosmological and aesthetic ideas char-
acterized the late-Renaissance notion of dynamic harmony. Giordano
Bruno, taking the orbit of the sun as a symbol, made a diagram with
two circles, one within, one outside, the orbit, intending to make visible
the principle that motion and rest, temporal and eternal, coincide. An
inborn desire to achieve complete harmony animates the universe so
outlined. It was this concept of dynamic harmony, associated with
intrinsic contrast and tension, to which Shaftesbury was heir. The
infinite process of harmonization requires, he believes, a “divine artif-
cer,” a “sovereign genius.” The age-old image of God as a craftsman
fashioning the world is revived here in the modern garb of “genius.”
Among Shaftesbury’s prominent contributions to our subject are his
views of the creative artist, or, as he called him, the “genius.” A
present-day reader, reviewing what Shaftesbury had to say about the
creative artist, cannot help feeling that his opinions are commonplace,
even trite. This impression shows, perhaps more than anything else,
how far-reaching was his contribution, how profoundly he has shaped
the modern notions of the artist. We find it difficult to envisage the
views of the artist that were current before the early eighteenth cen-
tury, and we today follow—to a larger extent than we realize—
Shaftesbury’s guidance. He figures eminently among the philosophers
and poets who created one of the great myths of the modern age, the
myth of the creative artist. Shaftesbury’s epigrammatic, pithy, pointed
formulations, some critics maintain, are often quoted out of context,
and thus may sound more radical than they actually are. Be this as it
may, one cannot be in doubt so far as the general orientation of his
thought is concerned.
Two features are essential in the creative artist, Shaftesbury believed:
originality and creative power. The notions themselves are not new, but
the earlier stages of our study did not accustom us to any emphasis on
originality or novelty. Shaftesbury, however, declares time and again
that the artist is an original master. “All is invention,” he says, “‘crea-

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tion, divining.” As if to explain what he means, he adds: “Things that

were never seen, nor that ever were; yet feigned.” It is this spirit of
invention that assures the artist’s independence. “ ’Tis on themselves
that all depends.” Over and over again he emphasizes the artist’s
freedom.*°
What did he have in mind when he spoke of this liberty? He could
hardly have meant a lack of social restriction. The time when artists
had to struggle for their liberation from the bondage of restrictive
medieval practices, as when Lorenzo Ghiberti had to go to jail for
refusing to belong to a guild, had long since passed. By 1700, painters,
at least those who were successful, were considered gentlemen. Nor
could Shaftesbury have meant only the freedom from rules that Federigo
Zuccari and Giordano Bruno had referred to precisely a century be-
fore.*° The rejection of restrictive and rigid rules plays a certain part in
Shaftesbury’s thought, but this does not seem to be a central issue or
one endowed with immediate urgency. What “freedom” means here, |
believe, is that the artist draws from his individual self, that he is the
ultimate origin of his work.
If this interpretation is correct, Shaftesbury, by shifting the emphasis
from one part of a traditional pattern to another, departs from tradition.
That “invention” is a major component in the creative process was a
belief held in many ages. Invenzione, as is well known, is the first part in
the “system of painting” that the Renaissance bequeathed to modern
Europe, and in art literature since the fifteenth century the artist’s
inventive power was often praised. But “invention” was not contrasted
with tradition, nor was it allowed to endanger the commitment to the
cultural and artistic heritage. It is characteristic that the founder of the
Renaissance theory of art, Leone Battista Alberti, advises painters to
associate with poets and orators, the exponents of literary tradition,
precisely where he speaks of invenzione. The poets and orators “could be
very useful in beautifully composing the istoria whose greatest praise
consists in the invention,” he says (Alberti on Painting [New Haven,
1956], pp. 76 ff). This is how invention was understood for centuries.
“The novelty in painting,” said Poussin in the mid-seventeenth century,
more than two centuries after Alberti and only one generation before
Shaftesbury, “does not consist principally in a new subject, but in good

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and new disposition and expression, and thus the subject from being
common and old becomes singular and new ” (Lettres de Poussin, ed. P.
du Colombier [Paris, 1929], pp. 243 ff.).
The artist’s inventiveness and originality, as Shaftesbury saw them,
differ from that traditional view. Pictures and statues are real and literal
creations, images the artist draws from himself, rather than more or
less slight modifications of a tradition handed down through the centu-
ries. Shaftesbury did not touch upon the age-old problem of creatio ex
nihilo, the “creation out of nothing,” but it seems obvious that he
believed the individual artist, and not accumulated cultural patterns, to
be the real originator of the work. A comparison of Shaftesbury’s beliefs
concerning artistic and moral freedom may be useful here. As ultimately
man, and not the moral law, is responsible for his deeds, so ultimately
the individual artist, not the tradition he inherits, shapes his work. It is
as an original, creative spirit that the artist has an inherent affinity to
God. Not fortuitously, Shaftesbury’s preferred mythological hero is
Prometheus, the independent creator, whom, as Oskar Walzel has
beautifully shown, the age between Shaftesbury and Romanticism me-
tamorphosed into the rebellious artist. One of our author’s most fre-
quently quoted utterances claims that the artist is “a Prometheus sub
Jove, a second maker.” *’
To what degree Shaftesbury believed the creative gift to be an
altogether personal, individual endowment, one can infer from his
advice that the artist seek the solitude of nature, the true place of
inspiration. Withdrawing from the social racket, retreating into the
silence of seclusion: this is the best way to discover one’s own, true
character. Shaftesbury even offers technical advice for educative behav-
ior: in solitude the artist should talk to himself in a loud voice. Soliloquy
in retreat leads to self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is an essential
condition in forming and articulating one’s character. The ancients did
this (Shaftesbury may have had Marcus Aurelius in mind, an author
much read in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England), and thus
they became “‘self-examiners.” An artist should be a self-examiner.
Whoever undertakes to represent the character of others should first
know his own.°®
To a twentieth-century reader, Shaftesbury’s high regard for the

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artist’s solitude may sound trite. If that is so, nowever, the reader
forgets how alien such a view was in the periods that preceded our
author, especially the Renaissance and Baroque. Anchorites and men of
letters, philosophers and mystics were reported to have sought solitude;
they were admired, their life stories were told, and there were some
intermittent attempts to imitate them. But the notion of the painter
and sculptor was little affected by all this. To be sure, occasionally an
artist’s bent for seclusion was noted (Michelangelo is the most famous
example), but on the whole this was considered as still another expres-
sion of that individual artist’s strange character and unsocial behavior.
Art as such was conceived as part of social life (when the term is taken
in its widest sense), and the production of a work of art was seen as an
act intimately interwoven in the social and cultural fabric of the com-
munity. It would be very difficult to find Renaissance and Baroque art
literature advising the painter to retire into solitude in order to dis-
cover, and articulate, his own character. In some ages, we should not
forget, the very showing of the artist’s character was seen as a danger
rather than an advantage. Leonardo da Vinci and the Venetian painter
and critic Paolo Pino, for instance, alerted the artist to the danger of
inadvertently depicting his own face in multifgure compositions. But
even where self-knowledge was accepted as valuable, its articulation
and expression were still considered to take place within a social matrix.
The young artist should get acquainted with his own nature, that is, the
star under which he was born—so Lomazzo requires—so that he
could find a teacher born under the same star who would help him to
shape his character. It was taken for granted that one’s personality and
style were shaped in continuing contact with society and by absorbing
the collective cultural heritage.*” For the Renaissance and Baroque
periods, the artist’s individuality outside any participation in his social
and cultural context was simply unthinkable. When Shaftesbury praises
seclusion as a way of knowing one’s character, he is breaking with a
long tradition and announcing the coming of the modern age.
In considering Shaftesbury as a thinker endowed with a subtle
sensitivity for processes that were unfolding beneath the surface, as it
were, we cannot fail to mention his particular version of the Sublime
and his new conception of the aesthetic experience. Shaftesbury did not

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explicitly discuss the Sublime, certainly not in painting. In fact, his taste
in painting was rather conventional for his time. Raphael and the
Carracci he saw as models of perfection. He tells his readers how he
could believe a picture by Raphael to be done by angels. Michelangelo,
significantly, “erred,” but “on the side of Greatness.” Yet while he did
not outspokenly present any views on the Sublime, he foreshadowed
the notions and helped prepare the emotional climate for the fascination
with the Sublime that became such a distinct feature in the course of
the eighteenth century. Enthusiasm, to which he devoted a lengthy
discussion, is not only a form of religious fanaticism and a disorder of
the imagination—all this was in full agreement with opinions held in
his time; it also provides a psychological basis for the Sublime.
Here we need not attempt a discussion of the Sublime, for we shall
have to return to that subject several times. I should like only to
mention briefly the specific direction of Shaftesbury’s influence respect-
ing this important issue. Shaftesbury was among the thinkers who
linked the Sublime with the external world, with what we visually
perceive of the world around us. As Marjorie Nicolson has shown, while
at a time in France when the idea of the Sublime remained mainly
rhetorical, in England a concept of the “Natural Sublime” was devel-
oping that found literary expression in books ranging from Thomas
Burnet’s A Scared Theory of the Earth (1681, 1684) to Joseph Addison’s
Pleasures of the Imagination (1712). Shaftesbury played an important part
in this development.°! In a well-known chapter of The Moralists, pub-
lished in 1709 but written earlier, he describes his emotional response
to walking in a mountainous wilderness. The travelers “are seized with
giddy horror, mistrusting the ground they walk on, led by new experi-
ence with vast and wild Nature to meditate upon the ruins of a world.”
Here he distinguishes, though hesitantly and in his rhapsodic manner,
between the Beautiful and the Sublime. In face of the latter, ‘““we cannot
help being transported with the thought of it. It inspires us with
something more than ordinary, and raises us above ourselves.” This
feeling for the indescribable, the “Aesthetics of the Infinite,” to use
Marjorie Nicolson’s felicitous phrase,°’ anticipates much of the latter
half of the eighteenth century’s thought on art, its potentials and

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

limitations. It also anticipates, and possibly sets the pattern for, some
considerations in the narrower field of art theory.
The other idea in which Shaftesbury anticipates a great deal of
modern aesthetic thought is altogether different. This is the notion of
aesthetic experience as being, to use the formulation Kant gave it by the
end of the century, a “disinterested pleasure” (interesseloses Wohlgefallen).
The idea, if not the term, is clearly present in Shaftesbury’s writing. We
experience beauty, our author claims in The Moralists, only if our response
to what we perceive is unselfish and without bias, that is, if it is a
disinterested perception. The experience of beauty, he insists, must be
completely separate from the desire to possess or the urge to manipu-
late. In The Moralists, one of the interlocutors addresses the other:
“Imagine, then, good Philocles, if being taken to the beauty of the
ocean, which you see yonder at a distance, it should come into your
head to seek how to command it, and, like some mighty admiral, ride
master of the sea, would not the fancy be a little absurd? ... Let who
will call it theirs... you will own the enjoyment of this kind to be very
different from that which some naturally follow from the contemplation
of the ocean’s beauty.” °
A critical reader may ask whether there is not a strain—though no
outright contradiction— between being transported into the unseen
and indescribable, on the one hand, and the altogether disinterested
contemplation of the sight one is faced with, on the other. But, as |
have said earlier, Shaftesbury is not a consistent systematic thinker. His
significance lies in anticipating the great problems of modern aesthetics,
and, at least partly, in indicating the direction of the intellectual
development of thought on art.

III. ANTIQUARIANS AND CONNOISSEURS

Modern reflection on the visual arts drew from many sources. Along
with philosophers and artists there were other groups that determined
the course of aesthetic thought, and among those groups the antiquari-
ans and connoisseurs loom prominently. “In the eighteenth century,”

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writes Arnaldo Momigliano, himself a connoisseur of antiquarians, “ce “‘a

new humanism competed with the traditional one.” The exponents of
that new humanism “preferred travel to the emendation of texts, and
altogether subordinated literary texts to coins, statues, vases and in-
scriptions.” The history of the archaeologically minded humanism is,
at a first glance, less enthralling than that of other groups. In the story
of antiquarianism, whether the objects unearthed belong to a distant or
to a more recent past, there are few sudden breaks and dramatic turns,
and the spirit of the ages they deal with can scarely be measured in
terms of years or decades. That story, then, has a slower pace than that
governing artistic creation or philosophic reflection. In the first decades
of the eighteenth century, however, the cumulative effect of the de-
voted and meticulous scholarship that often goes under the name of
antiquarianism on the broad intellectual orientation of the age must
have become quite considerable. As with so many other processes that
were taking place in the dark, as it were, it suddenly came to light in
the great intellectual upheaval of the middle of the century. Some of
the most important figures that founded the modern view of art were
either antiquarians or people with deep roots in connoisseurship.
Winckelmann was not only officially in charge of the ancient monu-
ments of Rome but became, as one knows, the founder of modern
archaeology; Herder was a connoisseur of both medieval literature and
lore and of ancient sculpture; Lessing not only revived the ancient
vision of death; he also retrieved from libraries the precious texts of
medieval works on connoisseurship (among them, Theophilus’s On
Diverse Arts) and wrote on ancient scarabs and amulets as well as on
ancient perspective. A review of what antiquarianism and the connois-
seurship attitude may have contributed to the theory of painting and
sculpture seems therefore desirable.
Antiquarians and connoisseurs, normally not concerned with the
“great,” comprehensive problems of artistic creation, may seem to be
far removed from the issues and aims of art theory. What could these
scholars, so totally immersed in figuring out the value of a Roman coin
or identifying the emperor represented on it, so profoundly concerned
with sorting out and classifying different objects, man-made or found
in nature, what could they contribute to the theory of painting? One

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cannot help wondering. Yet a closer look convinces the student that
connoisseurship and art theory, different as they may seem at a first
sight, are not altogether separated from each other. Antiquarian studies
help to determine the course of modern art theory less in terms of the
specific notions or concrete tasks they formulate than in the intellectual
environment they create. It was in the crystallization of mental atti-
tudes, of points of departure for further investigation, that the major
contributions of antiquarian studies to the living, growing art theory,
totally directed to the present, became significant. Though it is in the
nature of things that these contributions cannot be singled out easily,
they are not beyond the reach of rational analysis. I shall attempt to
present some of the central factors in the antiquarian contribution to
thought on art.
Nothing, it seems, could be further removed from the intellectual
world of antiquarians and connoisseurs than universal beliefs that, in a
precise sense of the word, go beyond what can be seen and proved.
Antiquarians, we have been educated to think, were completely devoted
to the individual object, the concrete, the material, and the tangible.
Yet they entertained theoretical convictions, among them the belief that
the visual is a truer and more reliable witness than the verbal record.
The notion that the image holds more truth than the word seems to
underlie a great deal of antiquarian study, and it may well turn out to
have been one of the major ideas that antiquarianism bequeathed to late
eighteenth-century philosophy of art.
As early as 1671, Ezechiel Spanheim, the founder of modern numis-
matics, reminded his readers of Quintilian’s observations on the contra-
dictions in what historians say, often concerning basic historic facts, and
of the consequent unreliability of historical research that is the neces-
sary result of these observations. The remedy for such uncertainty
seemed to lie only in the “ancient marbles.”©’ The testimony of the
material object is more secure than the literary evidence. A few years
later, in 1679, Jacques Spon, a physician who became a celebrated
numismatist, proclaimed the superiority of material, archaeological evi-
dence over all other forms of testimony.®° Once more we hear that
marble and bronzes are truer to what happened in the past than the
words of historians or of any other witnesses of remote events. In the

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 Modern Theories of Art

same sense, the early eighteenth-century writer Joseph Addison asserted

that “It is much safer to quote a medal than an author for in this case
you do not appeal to Suetonius or to Lamprodicus, but to the emperor
himself or to the whole body of a Roman senate.”°’ At about the same
time, an Italian scholar started a work entitled La Istoria Universale provata
con monumenti e figurata con simboli degli antichi, also based on the under-
lying conviction that simboli (that is, monuments largely pertaining to
what we call the visual arts) provide a firmer basis for historical inquiry
than does literary evidence.®8
The value of visual material as historical evidence is not here our
concern. The art historian is fully aware that visual testimony cannot
always be taken at face value, that it requires interpretation, and is thus
liable to error and false reading. What interests us here is that beliefs
were entertained, though not fully articulated, that the object perceived
in visual experience belongs somehow to a more elementary level of
being, is somehow closer to the origin of all things, than the more
subtle, but also more artificial, works belonging to the arts of the word.
When German Idealist philosophers, as we shall see in the next chapter,
started constructing hierarchic systems of the arts, they made the visual
arts the basis of the whole structure. Did they continue, and explicitly
formulate, what numismatists and connoisseurs intuitively believed?
The many students here lumped together under the collective head-
ing of “antiquarians,” though in fact they applied themselves to rather
heterogeneous branches of learning, made another important, and more
explicit, contribution to the foundation of a modern art theory: they
created the notion of connoisseurship and shaped the type of investiga-
tion that goes under that name. It was a contribution that was to make
a lasting impression on the mind of the modern world. So far, the
history of connoisseurship has not received the attention it deserves as
a unique way of studying art. Its life story has not been told as a
continuous narrative; only individual stages or facets of its development
have been more carefully explored. In some rudimentary form, it strikes
one as obvious, connoisseurship must always have existed; in all ages
people have surely tried to group pictures, statues, and objets d’art
according to what they believed to be their origin and function, or
according to some other criteria. And yet we shall probably not go

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

wrong in believing that it was only in the seventeenth century that

connoisseurship came into its own; only then was it regarded as an
activity sui generis, its practitioners having particular ends in mind and
gradually developing the conceptual apparatus necessary to meet those
ends. When in the late seventeenth century the Abate Filippo Baldin-
ucci (who died in 1696) classified the many drawings in Florentine
collections, distinguishing “hands” and trying to detect in them individ-
ual masters, and then carefully catalogued these works of art, he
produced one of the first feats of connoisseurship in the modern sense
of the term.®? Yet even though Baldinucci applied his approach to
works of art of a different nature as well (he bought paintings for
Cosimo III, and he wrote the first history of engraving), he did not have
a theory of connoisseurship. Such a theory appeared only shortly after
his death.
The theory came from Paris. In 1699 Roger de Piles, surrounded as
he was by a certain revolutionary aura, was finally admitted into the
very conservative Academy of Art, and in the same year he published
his Idea of the Perfect Painter.’° In that slim volume he presented what
must be the earliest doctrine of connoisseurship. The full title of Roger’s
work reads The Idea of the Perfect Painter: or, Rules for Forming a Right
Judgment on the Works of the Painters. The tension between the two parts
of the title is immediately obvious. The first (major) part of the title is
concerned with the artist, even with his most general image, his “Idea”;
the second part (the subtitle) is concerned with the artist’s work, and is
so from the point of view of forming a judgment. In the present
context, we are of course concerned with what is indicated by the
subtitle, the painter’s work.
Carefully reading de Piles’ text one senses both how large the
connoisseur’s problems loomed in the aesthetic reflection of the time
and also how dim and obscure the outlines of what precisely these
problems included still were. “There are three several sorts of knowl-
edge relating to Pictures,” Roger declares in Chapter 28 of his Idea of the
Perfect Painter; it is a chapter titled “Of the knowledge of pictures.” The
first sort is “to know what is Good and what is Bad in a picture.” 7’
What he here has in mind, then, is actually art criticism rather than
connoisseurship. By the end of the eighteenth century, the two prov-

47
 Modern Theories of Art

inces, art criticism and connoisseurship, were neatly separated from

each other, and the process of division took place mainly in France.
When in the second half of the century Denis Diderot, in his reviews
of the Salons, wrote art criticism proper, the question of the pictures’
authorship or related problems of connoisseurship didn’t come up. And
when Lessing published his Laocoén in 1766, his introduction clearly
distinguished between the critic’s concerns and those of the connois-
seur. Two generations earlier, however, in 1699, when Roger de Piles
published his Idea of the Perfect Painter, the line between criticism and
connoisseurship had not yet been sharply drawn. The notions were still
indefinite, their outlines somewhat blurred.
The other two “sorts of knowledge” that Roger adduces actually
belong to the realm of connoisseurship. One of them is “to know who
is the Author of the Picture.” For centuries, one need hardly say, this
remained the key connoisseur question and it seems already perfectly
evident to Roger de Piles. It is one that, in principle, makes a clear-cut
answer possible, for the notion of authorship needs no qualification, and
our author therefore concentrates on how to give definite answers.
Now, what is the solution? What should a connoisseur, asking who is
the author of an as yet unknown picture, actually do? He should look
and compare, says Roger quite sensibly, “The Knowledge of the Names
of the Authors in got by long Practice, and the sight of a great many
Pictures of all Schools. . . .”” He also knows how the connoisseur should
proceed in detail. “And, after having by much Application acquir’d a
distinct Idea of each of these Schools, if we could find out to which of
them a Picture belongs, we must compare it with that to which we
think it has the nearest affinity, and when we have found out the
School, we must apply the Picture to that Painter, whose Manner
agrees most with that Work. . . jue
Roger, then, is aware of the problem; he also knows that comparison
is the only way to approach its solution. But just what, which features,
should be compared is a question that is still completely beyond his
horizon. The same is also true for the third sort of knowledge pertaining
to our question, “If a Picture be an Original or a Copy,” in Roger’s
words. To answer this question he knows that you have to have a fine
sense of discrimination for the intangible, indefinable qualities that

48
 The Early Eighteenth Century

characterize a master, and this sense of discrimination is cultivated by

continuous observation and comparison. In the third sort of knowledge,
the observation and comparison (or whatever notions our author may
apply) remain intuitive, and therefore ineffable, as in the second sort.
An analysis of observation and comparison still belongs to a distant
future. Looking and comparing for Roger de Piles are essentially non-
analytical; he does not discriminate between the various parts, elements,
and features we take in while we look at a painting. In the second half
of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of scientific connoisseurship,
Giovanni Morelli, trained as a physician, became known beyond the
limited groups of connoisseurs for his method of ascertaining the
authorship of a painting. Every true artist, he claimed, is committed to
the repetition of certain characteristic forms. To determine who painted
a certain picture, we should identify its Grundformen, its fundamental
forms, and then find out which artist used these forms.’? The very
singling out of such fundamental forms is the beginning of an analysis
of observation and comparison, a removal of these processes from the
realm of the merely intuitive experience. But even more important is
the notion that the Grundformen that are characteristic of each individual
artist are not evenly distributed across the whole of the painting.
Certain parts (for example, composition, face) will be more strongly
determined by general, nonpersonal conventions than others, such as
the shape of the thumb or the lobe of the ear. What Morelli, then,
looks for are not the central part of the painting (such as the composi-
tion of the major figures or the facial expressions of the central heroes),
but rather what seem to be marginal features that did not attract much
attention. How deeply interwoven with modern ideas these thoughts
are has been shown in an interesting study by Richard Wollheim.”* If
we now look to Roger de Piles, it instantly becomes manifest how
different intuitive connoisseurship is from analytical, and on what
different themes it concentrates.
It is interesting to notice that though Roger de Piles asks who is the
author of the picture, his categories are not those of individual artists
but of collective entities, of schools. The connoisseur’s first and essential
task is to attribute the picture in front of him to a school, to an artistic
tradition. Roger even knows how many schools there are in the history

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 Modern Theories of Art

of painting, namely six. He is of course aware that there remains the

task of placing the picture more precisely within the school. “There are
Pictures made by Disciples, who have Copy’d their Masters very exactly
in their Judgment and their Manner. ... Nevertheless this Inconve-
nience is not without Remedy for such, as not satisfying themselves in
knowing a Master’s Hand, have Penetration enough to discover the
Character of his Mind.””°
The gradual building up of a theory of connoisseurship was a process
that involved the major European countries. Jonathan Richardson, the
British painter, collector, and writer to whom we shall revert at the
end of this chapter, was not only a connoisseur himself; he also gives a
clear picture of connoisseurship in his day and, what is more important,
emphasizes a certain aspect of connoisseurship that was to become a
central and characteristic feature of this activity. A good connoisseur,
Richardson claims, must avoid prejudice. ”° What he probably intends
to say is that the connoisseur cannot be a critic, nor can he be an
advocate of a certain style or manner. In this respect, Richardson sets
off clearly (though he does not say so) connoisseurship from art theory,
as it was practiced during the Renaissance. In the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, writers on art were usually convinced that there was only
one “true” or “correct” way of painting, and they naturally tried to
influence painters to follow this way. Richardson believes that the
connoisseur should refrain from preaching a gospel. While it would be
vastly exaggerated to claim for Jonathan Richardson the modern idea of
a “‘value-free” approach to art, it remains true that he thought that the
connoisseur should not be concerned with a comparison of values at all.
As the connoisseur is not a critic who can discriminate the better
from the worse because he has a reliable yardstick by which to measure
values, so he is not an educator who intends to shape the art of the
present and future. Here again, one sees how connoisseurship gradually
removes itself from Renaissance and Baroque art theory. In those
periods, authors of art theory had their own generation in mind, or
claimed— not always convincingly —that they wished to shape the art
of the present and future. This was so even when, to a large extent,
their studies and writings actually dealt with antiquities or with the
history of painting and sculpture. It is sufficient in this connection to

go
 The Early Eighteenth Century

remember the writings of Vasari and of Bellori. In the writings on

connoisseurship composed around 1700 or shortly thereafter, the per-
spective changes appreciably. Richardson speaking of connoisseurship
disregards the creating artist of his day. Claims of educating the next
generation of artists and of improving their work become thinner and
lose significance.
If waiving the claim to judge and to educate implies inevitable losses,
it also affords certain gains. The most important among the latter is a
catholicity of taste that must have struck early eighteenth-century
audiences as truly universal. Let me mention as an example that curious
aristocrat and professor at Leipzig, J. F. Christ, who in 1726 published
a monographic study of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach.7’
Because the author had little literary material to rely on, he had to
draw his knowledge from the pictures themselves, and so it is natural
that his ideas on connoisseurship play an important part. The careful
observer, he claims, should not trust too much in signatures or mono-
grams. (It is worth recording in this context that in 1747 Christ
published the first book on monograms.) He should recognize the works
of the masters by discerning their spirit, character, and manner. To be
able to do this, he ought to acquaint himself with the works of all
periods and all schools. The idea of art history—he actually employs
the term “history of art” a generation before Winckelmann, though not
as a titlke—serves as a framework for a truly comprehensive connois-
seurship. Modern art historians may find it entertaining that for J. F.
Christ an ample collection of engravings—the reproductions of that
time—served as the material basis for acquiring the intimate knowl-
edge of the art of different periods and schools.
Let me conclude this brief sketch of connoisseurship in the first half
of the eighteenth century with an example from France. A. J. Dezaillier
d’Argensville published another Abrégé des vies des peintres (1745) that was
much read, reprinted, and translated. Questions of connoisseurship
come up frequently, and great attention is devoted to the classification
of art into ee “schools.” Like some of the other writers of that period,
Dezaillier d’Argensville asks how one goes about attributing a picture
to a school or a master, and, as with the other authors, he sees in
comparison the key to the solution. But unlike most other writers, he

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 Modern Theories of Art

makes comparison a little more specific. Painters often have some

peculiarities, and noticing them may aid in identifying their works. The
works of some masters show particular facial expressions, they do the
hair and beards in a special manner, they prefer a particular fall of
garments, sharp or soft contours, accurately or carelessly painted hands
and feet, short or long fingers, small soft folds, and even a certain
direction of the brush strokes in shading. He gives some eye-opening
examples. Thus he singles out Parmigianino for the long, delicate fingers
of his figures. In shading, for example, Giulio Romano proceeds from
right to left, and where the shadows are heaviest the lines of the
brushstrokes cross each other. His heads have fine features, but the
contours of his figures tend to be vague, sometimes becoming altogether
indistinct. As opposed to the Italian master (who is here characterized
in an unusual manner), Rembrandt’s shading is irregular, and the
attitude of his figures is given by frequent retouching. The details of his
pictures remain inaccurate and unfinished; it is only the total impression
of a work that shows Rembrandt’s intention.”®
Here we watch connoisseurship slowly emerging from the somewhat
indistinct shape that resulted from the intuitive approach. New foci of
observation gradually crystallize as looking at a picture and comparing
it with other paintings becomes a more structured process. The contri-
bution of these observations, originally regarded as rather modest, was
profound and lasting. It rescued the theoretical approaches of art from
vagueness and a strict following of abstract norms that is always in
danger of becoming anemic. Antiquarians and connoisseurs, in their
love for minute and meticulous learning, discovered a whole new
dimension of looking at painting and sculpture.

[Viel da Beek

I. INTRODUCTION

The artists of the early eighteenth century, perhaps even more than the
philosophers of the age, testify in their written legacy to the character
of the period as an age of transition. The treatises composed by painters

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

in the first generation of the century offered the reader a curious blend
of traditional thoughts and patterns of composition, inherited from
Renaissance and Baroque art literature, and themes, emphases, and
points of view that were often new and that sometimes proved even
revolutionary. This curious blend may be taken as an indication of the
momentous transformation that was taking place at the time. Even
though in the early decades of the century the process was subterran-
ous, as it were—breaking into the open, as we know, only in the
middle of the century—some of the artists were obviously sensitive
enough to perceive these as yet invisible transformations. In their
writings, as often also in their paintings, the artists of the early eight-
eenth century lack the profundity, the liveliness, and the originality that
we experienced in the literary legacies of an Alberti or a Leonardo, a
Diirer or a Zuccari, a Poussin or even some academicians. Yet for a
better understanding of the further development of art theory, from
the mid-eighteenth century to our own day, it is worthwhile to analyze
what the artists of the first half of the eighteenth century said as
carefully as we can within the limits of the present study.
A few preliminary remarks concerning the conditions — intellectual,
social, and otherwise—from which these treatises emerged may help
us to focus on what is characteristic and new in them. The feature that
instantly catches one’s eye is that the most important documents of art
theory composed by artists of this period originated in northern Europe,
England, and the Netherlands. Italy, the classical country of art theory,
was at the time the captive of its own glorious past, and even France,
still under the powerful impact of what was going on in the Academy,
had little new to say. It is not for us here to ask what might have
motivated this shift from the South to the North, from one civilization
to another. It is of some interest, however, and may be worth noting,
that in this very generation, in the early eighteenth century, the signifi-
cance of natural environment on the development of intellectual life,
and particularly of art, was carefully considered, and a variety of natural
conditions explored. It was none other than the Abbé Dubos who
investigated what natural conditions, and particularly what climate,
might contribute to explaining the phenomenon of genius and to an
understanding of the cyclical development of cultural history. Dubos

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 Modern Theories of Art

anticipated much that, more than a century later, became the famous
doctrine of Hippolyte Taine.”
But whatever the explanation, the map of art theory, and with it the
cultural traditions and actual artistic models, gradually changed. It was
particularly England that, as one knows, began early in the century to
exert a profound influence on the aesthetic thought of the European
continent. Shaftesbury gave a new turn and urgency to the ancient
problem of creativity, to the problem of the artist and his inspiration,
stirring philosophical thought mainly in Germany. A short while later
emerged the great tradition of English art theory that will reappear
frequently in the pages of this book. Dutch painters emerged as impor-
tant contributors to art theory at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, and only one generation later German philosophers and paint-
ers began to make their mark. It goes without saying that these changes
in territorial distribution introduced a great variety of artistic traditions
and almost necessarily led to the manifestation of new problems.
In the whole of western and central Europe, but possibly with
particular significance in the “new” countries, social conditions were
undergoing dramatic changes. Most important for our purpose is the
training of the artist. Italy and France, countries with established
academies of art, were possibly less affected by this process in the early
eighteenth century, though they too must have felt the differences. In
the first half of the century the workshop education of the artist
reached the final stage of its disintegration. In his well-known book on
the academies of art, Nicolas Pevsner has adduced some interesting
statistical information that sheds light, even though indirectly, on what
must have been going on in the workshops. Around 1720, only three or
four institutions bearing the name of Academy of Art could be regarded
as real academies, functioning regularly and actually educating the next
generation of artists. Between 1720 and 1740, only six more such
institutions were opened, and even these few were of a rather dubious
value. By 1790, however, well over a hundred academies of art or public
art schools were flourishing.*° Between 1740 and 1790, a veritable
outburst of academic activity affecting the education of the artist took
place, fully and definitively transforming the way an artist was trained.

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It is surely not too much to conjecture that in the generation preceding

that unprecedented increase, that is, in the first generation of the
eighteenth century, theories of art and the thought of artists were in a
state of profound crisis. One imagines that in the thought of the artists
something similar to what we have seen in the philosophers’ thought
was happening: an invisible, subterranean revolution that, in the next
generation, was to break into the open. Vico and Dubos have shown us
that though the major transformation remained invisible for the mo-
ment, some indications of the great process were revealed. Is the same
true for what the painters and sculptors thought? What do the artists
themselves tell us?
The views prevailing among the artists of the first eighteenth-century
generation—and particularly among those of them who could be
described as “progressive” —can be learned mainly from two works,
Het Groot Schilderboek by the Dutch painter Gérard de Lairesse, and An
Essay on the Theory of Painting by the British painter Jonathan Richardson.
These books enjoyed great popularity at the time, and their wide
diffusion testifies that they said what people wished to hear. The treatise
by Gérard de Lairesse appeared originally in Amsterdam in 1707, and
was reprinted, in the original Dutch, in 1712 and 1740. A French
translation appeared in 1719 and was reprinted in 1787, while a German
translation was published in 1728 and reprinted in 1780. Richardson’s
work also met with obvious success. His Essay on the Theory of Painting
was originally published in 1715, and only a few years later, in 1719, it
was reprinted in an enlarged version, which, in turn, was reprinted in
1725. A French translation appeared in 1728.
The commercial success and wide distribution of these two works—
no small achievement when measured by early eighteenth-century stan-
dards—raises the important question of the audience that actually
bought, and presumably also read, these large volumes of not always
gripping prose. That question leads us to another, though closely
related, query: what audience did the authors of these bulky works
originally have in mind? All this ultimately boils down to this question:
what was the purpose of art theory in the minds of the artists compos-
ing it? Did Gérard de Lairesse and Jonathan Richardson wish to help,

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and thereby also direct, the painter in the workshop while he was
standing in front of his canvas, or was it rather their wish to explain
the problem of painting to the general educated public?
So far as I know, there are no specific studies on the early eighteenth-
century readers of these particular treatises. A sociological investigation
of art theory (and of the visual arts in general) remains an important
and urgent desideratum; so far, no real attempt has been made to fill
the gap, and | cannot consider myself competent to venture a detailed
hypothesis. Since the external evidence that might be used to answer
our questions is scant and unexplored, we must attempt to form an
opinion on the basis of the texts themselves and of their broad historical
context. In reading and discussing the treatises by Richardson and de
Lairesse, we will have to keep our questions in mind, and it may then
be possible for us to suggest, I hope in some detail, who constituted the
audience for these Northerners’ works on art theory. We shall then see
that, under the cover of a rather traditional presentation, the two
authors raised new and original problems, and addressed a reader who
was neither a craftsman who, like medieval artists, was being provided
with a “do-it-yourself” manual, nor a Renaissance humanist who ap-
proached art from the point of view of a rich literary tradition, and
frequently seems to have believed that an abundance of classical quota-
tions would suffice him in unriddling the secrets of painting. The
audience that both Gérard de Lairesse and Richardson wished to
address was no longer profoundly impressed with the display of sheer
technical skill and mastery of the medium; in what these artists say, the
virtuoso seems to be dethroned. Neither do sheer literary erudition, the
subtlety of allegorical reference, and the evoking of historical memories
continue to constitute the unquestioned peak of artistic achievement.
The painter of istoria, although not openly disparaged as in the later
nineteenth century, seems to be losing that almost sacred ground he
had held at least since the days of Alberti. To be sure, craft was
appreciated and the literary allusion highly regarded. But the emphasis
seems to have lain somewhere else, both for the audience and the
artists.
With the advantage of hindsight we can say that the themes that
were slowly emerging in the first half of the century were the reality of

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the work of art and the particular modes of existence of the different
types of pictures. Originally these themes were obscure, as are the
words we are using here, but in the course of the first decades of the
eighteenth century they gradually become clearer. At first, the artists
reflecting in writing on their work done in paint did not possess the
concepts and categories necessary to deal appropriately with the prob-
lems that emerged in their thought. Gérard de Lairesse’s extensive
discussion of the “genres” in painting is a serious attempt to come to
grips with what we have called modes of existence. Richardson’s
exploration of the Sublime may be another contribution to the same
problem. We shall now turn to them.

2. GERARD DE LAIRESSE

A modern reader (or spectator) may find it difficult to understand what

made Gérard de Lairesse so popular in his own day, but there can be
no doubt that he was greatly appreciated both as a painter and as a
writer on art. Jean Baptiste Descamps, a painter who between 1753 and
1763 published a monumental history of the art of his own time, La vie
des peintres flammands, allemands et hollandais, described Gérard as a “Dutch
Poussin;” the only detailed description of a painting that we have by
Johann Joachim Winckelmann is of a work by Gérard de Lairesse; and
no lesser mind than Goethe read his writing carefully." Gérard himself,
although a successful painter, obviously felt the need to reflect upon his
craft and calling. After an earlier, and rather brief, Principes du dessin
(1701), he published his great theoretical work, Le grand livre des peintres
ou l'art de la peinture (1707), in two heavy volumes.
In the Preface to the Grand livre Gérard explains his motivation for
writing the treatise and how it was composed. Referring to his blindness
at the time of writing (a misfortune he had in common with another
great figure in the theory of art, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo), he mentions
two central impulses for composing the treatise: love of his art, and the
desire to be helpful to the young painter. So far, he remarks, the writers
who have treated of painting have indulged themselves in “pompous
praises” of that art rather than endeavored to trace its “sure princi-
ples.” *? This, then, is what he wishes to do: to give the young painter

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the “sure principles” of his work. In itself, this aim is not new. Precisely
during the Italian Renaissance there were innumerable proclamations of
it. However, abstract theory (“‘pompous praises”) does not attract him.
What he envisages comes as close as possible to a “practical” book.
This book, he further notes, he has “composed in fragments,” a char-
acterization clearly borne out by the not very systematic order of the
text itself.
It would be futile to look in the Grand livre for an overall composi-
tional principle. In the Italian Renaissance, when the independent art
theoretical treatise was born, authors and probably also their audiences
insisted on a transparently rational structure. “To make clear my
exposition in writing this brief commentary of painting,’ > so reads the
very first sentence of Leone Battista Alberti’s treatise On Painting, “I will
take first from the mathematicians those things with which my subject
is concerned. When they are understood, | will enlarge on the art of
painting from its first principles in nature in so far as | am able.” 8?
Alberti’s work, written as early as 1435, set the tone for the art theory
of the Renaissance. A treatise, everyone at that time seems to have
taken for granted, first had to lay out basic and general principles; only
after having done this should the author set out to derive from these
tenets, proceeding systematically, his more specific and detailed obser-
vations and even the practical rules addressed to the practicing artist.
About three centuries later, when Gérard de Lairesse set out to
compose his Grand livre, the intellectual climate had changed and so, it
seems, had the aims of art theory. Just listen to the opening sentence of
Gérard’s Livre: “There are two different handlings of brushes: one suave,
mellow and smoothly finished, the other bold, intrepid and vigorous.” **
However interesting this distinction may be in itself, and whatever the
sensitivity it may reveal toward the artist’s craft and the pictorial values
of a painting, one cannot but wonder what made Gérard open his work
with such a sentence. The Grand livre is a very long work (of well over
1,000 pages) and deals with a wide range of the problems that may be
raised by the study of art. To open such a monumental work on
painting with some acute observations on types of brushstroke may lead
the reader to expect a modern homage to the artist’s individuality as
expressed in his “handwriting.” The reader who entertains such expec-

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

tations will be disappointed. Gérard de Lairesse is too close to the

academic age and spirit to hold such views or aims. Though he has a
keen eye for distinguishing between different ways of using the brush,
he does not overesteem the brushstroke in general. Brushstrokes don’t
have a value of their own. A picture is completed, he instructs his
readers, when all traces of work have been blotted out; at the end, “‘one
does not leave on the work any trace of the brush.’”’®° That a painter
could allow himself to be identified by his brushstrokes—his “hand-
writing,” ? as we would say today—would probably have appeared to
him a serious deviation from a good norm, a danger the artist should
foresee and overcome. This disregard for the individualistic personal
manner often shows in his work. In his discussion of portrait painting,
to give but one example, we read: “Above all the painter should beware
not to adopt a particular manner, as some masters have done; so that it
is easier to identify the brush than the person of whom the portrait is
made.”°°
This criticism increases our bewilderment at Gérard’s opening his
comprehensive treatise with an observation on types of brushstroke.
The solution to this riddle can be gathered from the first chapter of the
Grand livre, from which we have quoted the opening sentence. “Art,”
we here learn, “is a theory or a production of the mind (esprit); whereas
manner (maniére) is nothing but a practice (pratique) or manual execution
that depends on a certain skill in appropriately employing the brush
and laying out the colors in a suitable way.” Of the “mind,” let us say
in advance, we do not hear much in the rest of this bulky work. To be
sure, there is a considerable amount of codified cultural symbolism in
the Grand livre, particularly in the detailed and specific discussions of the
“meanings” the individual colors carry. Speculations on the Mind or
the Spirit, however, are not in keeping with Gerard’s personality. His
heart lies elsewhere, with the “manners” and what hangs together with
them. There he time and again stresses the need for “suitability.”
Nowhere in this long book does Gérard de Lairesse tell us just what
a manner is. He obviously took it for granted that every reader of his
work would know what he had in mind. Yet if the reader indeed wishes
to understand this notion with some precision he is left with the task
of reconstructing it from various hints dispersed throughout the book.

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 Modern Theories of Art

Nor is his task made easier by Gérard’s using the term in a loose way
and in a great variety of contexts. It is therefore difficult to propose a
formal definition. The core of the notion, one that is preserved in all
the various formulations, consists of a congruous relationship between
two poles, a relationship our author frequently calls “suitability.” What
these poles are is suggested in the first chapter of the work.
“Everything can be reduced to two manners of operating,” as we
remember, the two types of brushstrokes. In addition, however, our
author says that “every kind of painting has its own, different manner
of operation.” Gérard de Lairesse lists them in detail. “The landscape
painter has his [manner] for painting the foliage of trees; the painter of
animals has another [manner] for hide and wool; the still-life painter
employs another [manner] for the velvetness and variegation of
flowers.”®”
This short list of different types of painters, given within the narrow
confines of a single sentence, corresponds largely to the division into
“books” of the major part of Gérard’s Grand livre. The kinds of painting,
genres, as they are called in the French edition, are Gerard’s central
problem. To understand and properly appreciate his contribution one
has to analyze the problem of “kinds of painting,” and see what exactly
are the individual kinds he adduces. Before we set out to present what
Gérard has to say about the individual classes of painting, we should
perhaps pause for a moment and define the general notion of “kind” a
little more specifically.
Gérard de Lairesse, it need hardly be stressed, did not invent the
division of the “art of painting” into large, comprehensive units. The
idea that the bewildering mass of pictures—extant and possible—
should be arranged in a few basic classes has a long and rich history.
Within that traditional matrix, however, Gérard’s division is worth
attention, and should be studied both for the insights it may afford into
actual art and for the testimony it bears to the intellectual climate in
which art was contemplated in the early eighteenth century. We shall
begin by comparing Gérard’s “kinds of painting” with the older at-
tempts at such structuring.
The most significant of the older notions that comes to mind in the
present context is that of “mode” (modus). Underlying a great deal of

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Renaissance speculation on art, this notion was fully articulated in the

Baroque period. Nicolas Poussin’s letter of 1647 to Paul Fréart Chante-
lou is now probably the best-known document of this development in
Baroque art theory. Borrowing his terminology from the theory of
ancient and Renaissance music, Poussin spoke of “modes” (modi) of
painting. What he had in mind in using this term were fundamental
emotional characters. The Dorian mode, he says, is “stable, grave and
serene;” the Phrygian mode fits “pleasant and joyous things;” the
“Hypolidian mode contains a certain suavity and sweetness which fills
the soul of the spectators with joy; it lends itself to subjects of divine
glory, and paradise.” °°
We should keep in mind two characteristics of the concept of modus
as it was understood in the seventeenth century. The first one is
obvious: emotional qualities are the fundamental principle determining
the artistic modes. These emotional qualities do not necessarily corre-
spond to types of paintings. Pictures belonging to all the modes men-
tioned above would in fact form a single category in both Gérard’s and
even the Renaissance views: they would all be multifigure compositions
in which human figures act under the impact of emotions. But other
kinds of painting could also easily be made to manifest the different
modes. We can well imagine a “stable, grave and serene” landscape as
opposed to a “pleasant and joyous” one or one filled with a “certain
suavity and sweetness.” Though it would be more difficult to apply
these modes to portrait painting (though even this is not impossible), it
is again easy to think of still lifes exhibiting these emotional traits. The
system of modes is one that altogether disregards the system of pictorial
genres. Gérard de Lairesse’s list of “kinds of painting” thus cannot be
derived from the theory of modes.
The other characteristic of modus is the explicit assumption of a
congruity between the emotional character and the form in which the
picture is shaped. In other words, a “mode” is not just a mood, the
emotional nature of a certain subject matter, but rather the way in
which this mood or subject matter is pictorially represented. Therefore
the “‘mode” could be conceived as a specifically artistic category. Aca-
demic doctrine took over the notion in this particular sense. Henri
Testelin, the late seventeenth-century secretary and theoretician of the

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Paris Academy of Art, insistently repeats the traditional request that all
parts of a painting partake of the character of the subject represented,
so that the emotions the work seeks to evoke can be brought to life
immediately.*” Here, in this general demand of the mode, Gérard
follows the model, and repeats the traditional requests.
Other developments, both in the arts themselves and in aesthetic
reflection, should also be mentioned; they loom large in the background
of Gérard de Lairesse’s doctrine of the “kinds” of painting. Conspicuous
among these developments is the emergence and crystallization of
pictorial genres as art forms in their own right. The establishment of
the genres was a central process in the artistic and intellectual world of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Around 1600, still life, genre
painting, and self-contained landscapes began to evolve as more or less
autonomous species. The portrait, as we know, had for centuries been
accepted as a self-sufficient, articulate art form in painting and sculp-
ture. It is a matter of common knowledge that in this process northern
Europe played a crucial part, and even in Italy the emergence of the
pictorial genres did not take place without the active participation of
northern, mainly Flemish and Dutch, artists. Gérard de Lairesse thus
knew the crystallization of genres at first hand.
We are not concerned with the history of art itself, and in the
present context we shall therefore only briefly observe whether, and
how far, art theory around 1700 was aware of the development that the
generation witnessed. On the whole, art theory was slow in coming to
terms with the variety and independence of pictorial genres. The noble
art of history painting held pride of place, almost to the exclusion of all
other forms (except the portrait). Ever since Leone Battista Alberti had
written in 1435 that “The greatest work of the painter is the istoria’’
and “storia gives greater renown to the intellect than any colossus,” “y
this view remained dominant for almost three centuries. It governed
not only theoretical opinion but was reflected in specific judgments and
in many other ways. How dogmatic the belief in the superiority of
history painting was, and how widely ramified was its influence, we can
see—to adduce only one, somewhat farfetched illustration— from the
way exhibitions of paintings were arranged in eighteenth-century Paris.
The great canvases depicting historical scenes were placed on the top;

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below them came smaller paintings, often representing less noble or

elevated themes. Jean Seznec, who has called attention to this feature,
has correctly noticed that history paintings were “not on top in the
physical sense onl vena But while the supposed superiority of the history
painting is well known, we are less well informed about the relationship
between the other pictorial genres. Were they conceived as one mass,
juxtaposed as such to noble history painting, or were they seen as part
of a structured system, each capable of being arranged on a scale?
The question, perhaps not fully articulated, was obviously in the air.
In 1667 André Félibien, who can be considered the spokesman of
Poussin’s doctrine, delivered a lecture to the Academy of Fine Arts in
Paris in which he made a contribution to our problem. He started by
reminding his listeners that painting is an intellectual pursuit; mixing
colors and drawing lines do not qualify one as an artist but rather as a
craftsman. He then went on to show how and in what way painting
concerns the mind. Insofar as artists concern themselves with more
difficult and more noble objects they emerge from the lower regions of
their art and rise to a more dignified status. For instance, the most
excellent are the artists who represent a group of dramatic figures in a
subject borrowed either from history or mythology. Next comes the
portrait painter; though he represents the human figure, he has not yet
reached the summit of painting. The painter who depicts portraits,
however, ranks higher than his fellow artist who renders only fruit,
flowers, or shells. The painter who represents living animals deserves
more esteem than the one who depicts only lifeless things. Still life,
then, seems to be the lowest degree in this system.”
Félibien delivered his lecture only one generation before Gérard de
Lairesse wrote his Grand livre, summarizing his ideas that surely reflect,
to a large extent, accepted, conventional wisdom. It is worth emphasiz-
ing some elements in Félibien’s concepts; in comparison with them the
novelty, as well as the links with tradition, of Gérard’s system may
become manifest. Let us stress, first, that Félibien lists all major pictorial
genres, some of them clearly with Dutch art in mind, such as the
depiction of animals. Second, these pictorial genres are arranged in a
hierarchic system, each art graded and assigned its place on the scale.
Now let us come back to Gérard de Lairesse. What distinguishes his

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approach to the “kinds of painting,” when compared to the modi of

Poussin or the “species” mentioned by Félibien, becomes almost tangi-
ble. Gérard’s “kinds of painting” are neutral in expressive character,
they have no emotional character of their own, and therefore they are
indifferent to the moods. The universal maxim, “Variety is the soul of
pleasure,” ae is also valid for the genres of painting. Therefore, our
author claims, you can have different emotional characters within a
single “kind of painting.” Let us look at a single example, at what he
says about landscape painting. Gérard de Lairesse, perhaps against his
own will, was still deeply rooted in the mythographic tradition; it is not
surprising, therefore, that he lists some mythological motifs that could
appropriately be depicted in landscape settings. One of them is the
story of Venus and Adonis, a story that in the seventeenth century
provided an excuse for quite a few almost pure landscapes. From the
narrative Gérard picks three moments: (1) Venus lavishing caresses on
Adonis; (2) Adonis, preparing for the hunt, bids farewell to Venus; (3)
Venus finds the dead body of her beloved Adonis. These three stages
are, in fact, the embodiment of three emotional states and can thus be
considered as demanding representation in three different modes. The
natural setting in each of the scenes—that is, the landscape—is
described as fully reflecting the mood characteristic of the action taking
place. In the first picture, showing Venus caressing Adonis, “the site is
a delicious field, where one finds everything that can soothe the sight;”
it is “a beautiful spring day,” the “light is one of a radiant sun.”* The
scene represented in the second picture is one of-conflict. The painter’s
way of showing the natural setting partaking in the moral nature of the
event is to place dramatic elements on either side of the picture. To the
right, Gerard suggests, ‘“‘an elevation” (a mountain) should be seen; it is
apparently high, as it can be climbed only in several stages. To the left,
between the center of the painting and the frame, are seen “three or
four beautiful trees, beginning from the groundline and reaching above
a hill;” in the background, behind the trees, “there rises a big rock of
savage mien.”?° In the third picture, the dead Adonis is seen lying at
the foot of a mighty oak, leaning his head against its trunk. Behind the
oak one sees a cloudy sky. “The season is rainy and cloudy, a winter
day. ... The trees have only a few leaves.””°

64.
 The Early Eighteenth Century

Two lessons, it seems, can be learned from this single example. On

the one hand, the landscape is decidedly a medium of manifesting
emotions, the natural features—the field, the trees, the hills and rocks
— participate in the feelings pervading the actions represented. On the
other hand, we also see that landscape as such, as an articulate art form,
is devoid of any emotional leanings or character of its own. Landscape,
like the other genres of painting, is capable of expressing different
emotions because it has none of its own. With regard to expression,
then, Gérard’s “kinds of painting” are altogether opposed to the modes
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art theory.
Félibien’s “species” of painting differ from Gérard’s “kinds” in an
altogether different way. In listing the individual genres, Félibien and
Gérard largely overlap, though there are significant divergences. Yet
they are altogether divided with regard to the principle dominating the
grouping of the individual genres and establishing an order between
them. Félibien, it will be recalled, built a hierarchic structure, a ladder
of pictorial ‘“‘species.” Gérard de Lairesse sees no hierarchy of pictorial
classes and therefore does not rank one “kind” higher than the other.
This is not to suggest that Gérard treated all elements or motifs in
painting as of the same value or as if there were no need to prefer one
to the other. Within each “kind of painting,” Gérard does not doubt,
various objects have different values. Again, a single example will clearly
show his intention. In the Eleventh Book of the Grand livre, that dealing
with still life, he refers to the variety of objects that can be represented.
“Now I will leave it to the judgment of connoisseurs and sensitive
people,” he continues, to decide “which are the nature-objects that
merit preference over others.”?’ While he does not hesitate, then, to
accept the principle of discriminating between the more or less merito-
rious within each class of picture, he refuses to apply this principle to
the “kinds” as such. The modern student is forced to conclude that for
Gérard de Lairesse all pictorial genres were, in principle, of equal value.
The equivalence of pictorial genres is testimony to a historical shift
of far-reaching consequence; it should be reckoned among the most
telling signs of the arrival of modernity. What it suggests is that the
value of a work of art is no longer dependent on its subject matter.
This is a secularization of painting. Instead of the dignity of subject

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matter, of the idea expressed, another value emerges, indifferent to the

theme depicted. It was none other than the great German philosopher
G. W. F. Hegel who, a century after Gérard de Lairesse published his
Grand livre, articulated the essence of this transformation. He argued
that the “Dutch replaced the interest in significant subject matter with
an interest in the means of representation as an end in itself.”78
Having considered Gérard’s general notion of pictorial genres, let us
now turn to the “kinds of painting” he actually gives. I shall start with
a brief comment on the list as a whole and shall then discuss some of
the individual “kinds.” Since Gérard’s “kinds of painting” do not form
a rational system, where one part follows from the other by logical
necessity, their nature and scope must be explained by the historical
reality from which they emerged.
The art historian does not have to be told that artistic production in
seventeenth-century Holland was dominated by a hitherto unknown
specialization in the history of painting. Painting was practically split
into various types, or “kinds,” of secular subject matter, each type
tending to acquire a definite shape of its own. The categories of
landscape, still life, scenes from everyday life, and so forth originated in
the latter half of the sixteenth century, but it was only during the
seventeenth that they became fully defined as pictorial types. As church
commissions became steadily scarcer, the need to cater to popular taste
became an increasingly powerful motivating force in giving definite
form to these types. Moreover, subtypes crystallized in the process.
Landscape, for instance, became either the depiction of a regular piece
of nature, or an image of a city (cityscape), or of the sea (seascape),
with a variety of further subtypes. When this process had reached its
apogee, painting in the Netherlands presented a gallery of fully formed
“kinds.”
The composition of Gérard’s list, the presence or absence of certain
categories, also indicates the origin of his thought in contemporary
historical reality. The notions and categories he employs reflect what
we know from Dutch art of the seventeenth century. Thus, in the Grand
livre, religious subject matter does not form a “kind” of painting, and in
general it is very little mentioned. Protestant iconoclastic zeal, it is well
known, was particularly widespread in the Netherlands. In actual paint-

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ing, the representation of sacred themes was severely reduced, and art
forms serving religious ritual (such as the altarpiece) almost disappeared.
Gérard’s categories, or rather the conspicuous absence of some of them,
reflect this state of affairs. The subject matter of “history” painting
proper—that is, glorious historical events, and mainly mythological
stories—is more frequently adduced. It often serves to enliven some
types of painting which belong to one of the accepted “kinds.” A good
example, which we have already mentioned, is that of the stages of the
story of Venus and Adonis, used to accentuate different moods of
landscape. However, while the themes of “history” painting are fre-
quently mentioned, they do not form a “kind” in their own right; they
are not accepted as one of the major parts of painting.
To appreciate how far removed Gérard de Lairesse was from the
traditional system of pictorial “kinds,” it will be enough to compare his
list of genres with that of Giovannni Paolo Lomazzo, the last great
Renaissance theoretician of art. Gérard is much more concentrated than
Lomazzo. In the last part of the Trattato della pittura, a part devoted to
“practice,” Lomazzo adduces tens of categories, thus leaving the reader
with the feeling of some rather blurred diffusiveness. In comparison,
Gérard’s seven “kinds” give the impression of being firmly structured.
Yet the difference in the nature of the categories is much more
profound. Lomazzo, heir to humanistic learning and writing under the
powerful impact of the Counter-Reformation, extensively discusses
religious themes, as the painter should know and see them. He also
explores in great detail the subject matter of istoria, devoting much
attention to both mythology and allegories. Religious and mythological
themes are categories, or genres, in their own right. But Lomazzo does
not know of any classes or types of pictures devoted to landscape or
still life. Between Italy in 1584, when Lomazzo wrote his Trattato, and
the Netherlands in 1707, when the Grand livre was published, an almost
complete reversal took place, both in actual art and in the theory
reflecting on the problems it raises.
At first, the individual genres discussed by Gérard de Lairesse seem a
rather odd mixture. Landscape (Book VI), portrait (Book VII), still life
(Book XI), and flowers (Book XII) do not surprise us; they are art forms
to which we have become accustomed. But “ceiling painting” also gets

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a book of its own (IX), because ‘‘among all the kinds of painting there
is none more difficult.”?? That in a treatise on painting architecture
should also get a long discussion (Book VIII) may seem even more
surprising, but the author explains at the opening of the book that he
will not deal with architecture as such but only insofar as an acquain-
tance with “that fine art” is useful for the painter. In the book on
architecture he includes a short but very interesting chapter on ruins, a
highly topical theme in eighteenth-century painting.'”° The book on
sculpture is rather isolated in the Grand livre. The emphasis the author
places on relief (a theme rarely touched by Italian writers on sculpture
in the seventeenth century) again indicates that the tridimensional art is
actually seen from a painter’s point of view. The last book (XIII),
devoted to engravings and the uses that can be made of them, is an
afterthought. Reviewing the books on the different genres, one may still
find some oddities and unexpected combinations, yet the dominant
concern is clear: everything is seen with a painter’s eye.
What an individual “kind of painting” is and what it involves, | shall
try to show by analyzing one example. Nowhere perhaps are Gérard’s
originality as well as his limitations so manifest as in his treatment of
still life (Book XI) to which the discussion of flowers (Book XII) should
be appended. Even a brief analysis of what he has to say about still life
will show, I hope, that Gérard stands midway between two great ages.
Past and future clearly meet in his work, and this meeting is often a
transformation of the old into the new, but sometimes also a clash
between them. Perhaps for this reason Gérard’s treatment of still life is,
as Georg Kauffmann noticed in a useful article,'°! diffuse and “brittle.”
That Gérard’s treatment of still life is hesitant should surprise no
one. Though painters produced many still lifes—in seventeenth-cen-
tury Holland, but also in France and in other countries, still life painting
became a veritable industry —contemporary critics and philosophers of
art were slow in coming to terms with this flourishing art form. Even
in the most comprehensive treatises of art theory composed in the late
eighteenth century, still life is often omitted or only marginally men-
tioned. It was only in the nineteenth century that critics, looking at art
and its history from an altogether modern point of view, discovered
still life as an artistic genre in its own right, with its own distinct

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problems. In his time Gérard de Lairesse was isolated in his theoretical

concern with still life, and his pioneering efforts in this particular
domain have not yet received the attention they deserve.
Gérard does not, as a rule, give a formal definition of the “kind of
painting” he is discussing. In the books on portrait and landscape, for
example, we shall look in vain for a rigid statement of what precisely
the subject matter or portrait or landscape is. This may be because the
“aim” of each given genre seemed to him so obvious that no explana-
tion was called for. In the case of still life, however, he deviates from
his normal procedure. The aim of still life, Gerard explains, “is to
render all the inanimate [the Dutch editions has: all the still] objects,
such as flowers, fruits, vases, utensils, and musical instruments of all
metals, as well as marble, stones, wood. ...”!°* Here an attempt is
made to outline the scope of still life, perhaps also to emphasize what is
essential in that genre, namely the material nature of the objects
routinely encountered in everyday experience. Histories are repre-
sented, we have heard since the Renaissance, for their noble subject
matter or for the religious message they convey; portraits are painted
to keep alive the memory of the deceased, or to honor rulers or poets.
But why depict a fruit, a utensil, or a piece of wood?
Gérard de Lairesse does not spell out the question. But the reader,
attentive to tone and context, will not find it too difficult to extract an
answer from Gérard’s prose. There are, in fact, two different answers,
placed side by side and often even interpenetrating. Still life as a theme
in painting, to follow Meyer Schapiro, corresponds to a field of interest
outside art. We sense this, without having to refer to a particular cause,
when we note the gradual separation of still life as an independent
subject in the sixteenth century, or the fascination with it in seven-
teenth-century painting. The objects chosen for still-life representation
—flowers, fruits, vases, implements, and manipulated materials (such
as stones or wood)— belong to the specific domains of the private, the
domestic, the gustatory. “Simply to note these qualities is to suggest a
world view.” !7
It is not for us to decide what were the motivations that prompted
this world view. Was it the appetite for sensual experience, or was it
rather the surrender to the tangible reality of material objects? Gérard’s

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text can be read in support of both explanations. He obviously enjoys

the color and texture of objects, and stresses that the painter should
choose such objects that “flatter the eye.” But he also indicates his
complete absorption in the tangible, material reality of objects. It is a
sin against the rules, Gérard says, to introduce into a still life elements
of other “kinds of painting,” such as landscape, architecture, or human
beings. “That would absolutely destroy the idea of still life.” Neverthe-
less, in his treatment of other kinds of painting—portrait, landscape,
and so on—he does not make similar demands. The puzzle may be
solved when we remember that this “‘idea’”’ denotes the world of objects
that are nothing but material objects, the domain of sheer tangible
things. Probably to preserve the object character of these things, Gérard
makes still another request: it is a ‘matter of principle” that the objects
of a still life should not be represented smaller than they are in
nature. !°
Sensual delight in beautiful objects or the impact of sheer materiality
are not the only motives for reproducing in art the images of everyday
objects; frequently one paints, and enjoys, such pictures because still
life can be made into a carrier of symbolic messages. “It is not impossi-
ble,” says Gérard, “to give to still life painting an allegorical meaning,
as is applicable particularly to certain figures.” E88 Examples of still lifes
carrying allegorical meanings can be found, he goes on, in the pictures
of Willem Kalf, whose works the young artist wishing to devote himself
to this field of painting would do well to study. This Dutch painter, as
one knows, used to represent elaborate gold, silver, and glass vessels,
glittering objects of great value, endowing them with symbolic messages
of death and the fragility and vanity of human life and material posses-
sions. He is a good example of the well-known genre of Vanitas still
life, a type of painting particularly common in seventeenth-century
Holland. In such paintings, if we are to follow the interpretation offered
in the Grand livre (it was an interpretation broadly accepted at the time),
the shining, tangible object loses it sheer opaque materiality and be-
comes a medium that lets symbolic ideas shine through.
How does symbolic thought work in still life? How do material
objects become the transparent carriers of abstract ideas? Gérard de
Lairesse, though he does not put the question in these words, is

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profoundly concerned with it. He wants to discover the permanent

patterns by which meanings are transmitted in still-life painting. Sym-
bolic objects, all of them inherited from classical antiquity, are one of
the established channels of investing the domestic object with an
invisible, yet clearly perceptible meaning. These classical objects, we
know, evoked certain specific connotations, the audience reacted to
them in specific ways, and they came to be accepted as the carriers of
these specific meanings. However these objects came to be invested
with symbolic power, one cannot help wondering about their place
within the category of still-life painting. To be sure, they were inani-
mate, yet they were hardly household possessions. Roman cuirasses and
crowns were rarely found even in better Dutch homes. If still-life
painting purposes to depict more or less ordinary objects, it is difficult
to make these ancient symbolic artifacts fit into the conceptual frame
of the genre. Gérard evidently devotes such a large part of his discourse
on still life to these object-symbols because of his desire to institution-
alize the role of still life as a carrier of ideas. In the actual contents of
his discussion he is close to the heraldic reading of ancient remains and
imagery that was so widespread in his time. Just listen to what some of
these objects are: a steel cuirass, a beautiful helmet, a golden chain, a
sword, a scepter topped by an eye, triumphal crowns, Roman military
costume as well as that of other peoples (Persians, Carthaginians, and
so on). A full list would probably hold several dozen historical and
symbolic items. Obviously we are here witnessing the imposition of the
antiquarians’ work on the theory of even such a “modern” branch of
art as still life. At the same time, we also see how confused and
ambiguous were views as to what still life as a category of painting
really was.
Another way of establishing symbolic meanings in still life is associ-
ated with the relationship between the individual picture and the
patron, or limited audience, for whom it is painted. The still life is
made to adjust to the function and social role of the patron. Gérard
describes four ideal still lifes done for, respectively, a victorious warrior,
a judge, a jurist, and a clergyman. The pictures differ from each other
in the selection of the symbolic objects represented. Being adjusted to
the patron’s function, they help define his role in society. In none of

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 Modern Theories of Art

the other pictorial genres, it should be recalled, is such an adjustment

of the picture to the patron even considered. The general, one infers,
does not get a different landscape or architectural piece than the judge
or clergyman; not even in the portrait is the social differentiation so
clearly manifested as in the still life. Still life is the single genre
conveying meanings that is required to adjust itself to the client. In this
Gérard de Lairesse is clearly following the emblematic tradition that
was powerful and popular in the northern Europe of his time. This can
be seen both in the selection of the objects appropriate to each type
and in the explanation of these objects that the author provides. The
eleventh book of the Grand livre, that dealing with still life, affords a rare
opportunity to watch the secularization of emblematics and its transfor-
mation into still life.
Symbolic meanings need not always be conspicuously displayed; they
can also follow more subtle routes. Certain flowers, for example, are
connected with certain gods and goddesses; they can symbolically
represent these gods and perhaps also what these gods stand for. Nature
provides a variety of flowers, and each of them, Gérard emphasizes, has
different qualities that make it appropriate for depiction. “The white
lily is dedicated to Juno; the sunflower to Apollo; the rose to Venus;
the poppy to Diana and Morpheus; the corn flower to Ceres.” !°° Fruits,
too, have affinities with the gods. “The pomegranate is granted to Juno;
vine branches as well as figs belong to Bacchus; peaches and wheat to
Ceres and Isis; apples to Venus and Apollo.” The same is also true for
that other favorite feature of still lifes, musical instruments: “the lyre is
consecrated to Apollo, the Muses, and to Mercury; the flute to Pan and
Venus; the trumpet to Mars. .. .” '07 The whole world of “inanimate”
objects, it turns out, is covered by a fine network of symbolic meanings
and relations. You cannot approach a simple object, you cannot step
into this domain of everyday things without getting enmeshed in this
symbolic fabric. Every seemingly innocent flower piece or still life
combining some vine branches or apples in front of a casually placed
flute may thus carry an encoded emblematic message. The spectator
enjoying the picture in front of him may have no inkling of the symbolic
depth of what he sees. The colors themselves, even when they are the
colors of a flower or a fruit, are carriers of meaning. The yellow

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sunflower, the red rose, the white lilly: they are all permeated with
meanings. '°° Choosing one or the other is a handling of symbols.
Let us not forget, however, that in Gérard’s treatment of still life
there is still another trend, along with the emblematic attitude, and this
one is strikingly modern. The very objects—the flowers, the fruits, the
musical instruments—whose symbolic dimensions are stressed, are
described in a manner that makes us altogether forget any emblematic
attitude. Let us look at a single example. In the treatment of flowers,
only a few pages after the passages just quoted, we read: “My intention
is to form a large mass of beautiful flowers in bright colors, placing in
the middle the thickest and most vigorous one, such as the white ones,
the yellows, those of a lively red. The tallest ... will be a sunflower;
and at the sides | will place others of less beautiful colors, mixing them
here and there with a beautiful blue.” '°? The reader is amazed. Is this
the same writer who attributes flowers and fruits to gods known only
from books, and who simultaneously describes a flower piece with such
vividness of perception and enjoyment of color sensation that one
cannot even think of a possibly symbolic aspect of his subject matter?
Gérard’s views of still life—among his most original contributions
—are typical of his notions of the other “kinds of painting” and of his
doctrine as a whole. The clash between attitudes, between the tradi-
tional and the modern, within the teaching of the same writer, marks,
perhaps more than anything else, the specific position he holds between
the ages. It perhaps also specifically characterizes the first half of the
eighteenth century as an age of rapid transition, preparing the great
changes that were about to take place in the middle of the century.

3. RICHARDSON: THE RISE OF THE SUBLIME

The process of transformation that introduced the modern age compels

the student of art theory constantly to redraw his map. For many
centuries the great schools of art theory were to be found in Italy, and
to Italy scholars all over Europe turned whenever matters of painting
and sculpture were discussed. Only in the seventeenth century did
France and the Netherlands (and, to a lesser degree, other countries,
such as Spain) acquire in this field a status that could be regarded as

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independent. Since the Middle Ages, England had played a rather

marginal role in articulating thoughts on painting and sculpture, but in
the eighteenth century it emerged strongly in this field, bursting forth
with a surprising creativity. A wide range of intellectual types now
entered this domain, and new, original problems were raised. The
English contribution to art theory made an immediate impact on
aesthetic thought in Europe, and thus became a part of a comprehensive
process.
In the periodization of English aesthetic thought in the eighteenth
century we usually follow the pattern generally accepted for other
countries, namely, that the chief contributions are clustered in the
middle and second half of the century. A glance at the dates of the
outstanding works would seem to confirm this impression. Thus, to
give but a few examples, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful appeared in 1757,
William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty in 1753, and Joshua Reynolds’s
Fifteen Discourses on Art were delivered to the Royal Academy, of which
Reynolds was a member, on ceremonial occasions from 1769 to 1790
and were published individually. Yet in spite of what these dates seem
to imply, the first half of the century in England was one of productive
growth. The trends that were to come into the open by mid-century
were quietly but powerfully ripening in the earlier decades. Moreover,
at the beginning of the century some important contributions were
actually made, and they evoked a lively response on the European
continent. Earlier in this chapter | mentioned Shaftesbury; now | shall
turn to a less philosophical treatise, composed and published in the
early eighteenth century. It is the literary work of Jonathan Richardson
(1665-1745), who was assisted by his son, Jonathan the Younger (1694—
1771). The Richardsons, father and son, were painters, critics, and
collectors. Their reflections on painting are significant both as a testi-
mony to the thought current among British painters in the first decades
of the century and as an adumbration of some of the great problems
and trends that dominated late eighteenth-century thought and, partic-
ularly, Romanticism.
Jonathan Richardson the father in his time was a well-known portrait
painter. From his teacher, John Riley, he inherited a stiff and solemn

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manner, which he further propagated in the school he founded (called

St. Martin’s Lane Academy). His major impact, however, was made
through his books. The first, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, appeared
in 1715, and in an enlarged version in 1725 (to which another brief
treatise, Two Discourses, originally published in 1719, was added). With
his son he also wrote a guide book (An Account of the Statues, Bas Reliefs,
Drawings and Pictures in Italy, France, etc., London 1722) that enjoyed a
great reputation; the noble and educated who went on the Grand Tour
employed it widely and took it with them, and Winckelmann still
thought that, in some respects, it was the best book written on the
visual arts.''° In the present context, it is of course the first work, An
Essay on the Theory of Painting, with which we are concerned.
Most parts of the Essay do not offer any new message. The student
of art theory feels he is treading familiar ground. The conservative
character of Richardson’s thought is not surprising; of an author of his
artistic orientation and social position one does not expect the preach-
ing of a new gospel or the proclaiming of something that might
undermine the norms accepted in his time and world. Only with respect
to one, though admittedly rather central, issue does the author of the
Essay contrive the seemingly impossible: to closely follow some widely
known and accepted ideas and, at the same time, to make an original
contribution to art theory. Here the interaction of the different cultural
traditions was so complex that one doubts whether, in fact, our author
was altogether aware of how original he was. The issue I have in mind
is his discussion of the Sublime in painting.
The Sublime, it need hardly be said, is an age-old problem. Inherited
from Antiquity, it was to some extent revived in Renaissance aesthetic
thought, and certain aspects of it were extensively examined in the
critical literature of the seventeenth century. Yet throughout that
eventful history, the Sublime with a capital S, that is, as a conceptual
category, remained firmly enclosed in literary criticism and theory. It
was not systematically expanded to include the other arts. To be sure,
ever since the sixteenth century, philosophers, critics, and artists re-
flecting on painting or sculpture did occasionally touch on the Sublime,
but they never conceived of it as a category in their own deliberations.
It is symptomatic that in the vast Renaissance literature on painting and

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sculpture, a literature that abounds in crystallizing a new and compre-

hensive terminology for the visual arts, no term was coined, or used,
for the sublime. Even in the seventeenth century, when interest in the
sublime was pronounced in all fields of literature, it hardly appeared on
the horizon of the writer on the visual arts. Roger de Piles only once
mentions le Sublime et le Merveilleux in his Traité de peinture parfait, a work
that appeared in 1699, and even here it is included in a short chapter of
less than a page stressing that the Grand Gusto, the Sublime and the
Marvellous are the same.''' A few years later, in 1715, Richardson
included in his Essay a lengthy and detailed discussion, extending over
thirty-three pages, of the sublime in painting. '! He is also the first to
expressly adduce pictorial examples for this category. It is no exaggera-
tion to claim that his chapter constitutes the first real discussion of the
sublime in painting, and that we here witness the introduction of this
notion into the theory of the visual arts. In the following observations,
I shall concentrate on this one contribution of Richardson’s.
All discussions of the sublime in European history, we need hardly
remind ourselves, go back to one ancient document, the Peri Hupsos (On
the Sublime) attributed to Longinus, a Greek rhetorician of the third
century A.D. It is not for us to discuss this famous text, to which many
fine studies have been devoted, but in order to better understand
eighteenth-century art theory I shall emphasize some of its specific
points. The effect of the sublime, so Longinus suggests, is to take the
spectator “out of himself.” When man encounters the sublime—in
nature, in human life, or in the arts—it “lifts him up.” This is also true
for the effect of art. Referring to literature, Longinus said: “A lofty
passage does convince the reason of the reader whether he will or not.”
Being carried away, taken out of oneself, swayed whether one wills it
or not—these reactions would seem to stand in marked contrast to
the values for which works of visual arts have been traditionally praised,
such as a harmony of the parts that imparts calmness, precision, and a
conviction of the natural character of the representation. Can one infer
that the sublime is more appropriate to the narrative than to the visually
evident, to literature than to painting and sculpture? Now, interestingly
enough, Longinus can in fact be read to that effect. The sublime is
found in nature and also in literature, but not in the visual arts. “It has

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been argued by one writer,” he says, “that we should not prefer the
huge disproportioned Colossus to the Doryphorus of Polycletus. But
(to give one out of many possible answers) in art we admire exactness,
in the works of nature magnificence; and it is from nature that man
derives the faculty of speech. Whereas, then, in statuary we look for
close resemblance to humanity, in literature we require something
which transcends humanity.” " ;
When, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, concern with the
Sublime revived, there was little change in this respect. The whole
problem obviously was not considered as an important one, but so far
as Longinus was studied, people accepted what he said without much
questioning. This is also the impression one gets from Boileau’s famous,
though not always precise, translation of Longinus’ work and from the
great French tradition of interpreting On the Sublime. Seen against this
background, Jonathan Richardson’s long chapter devoted to the Sublime
in painting stands out as very unusual. How are we to account for this
novel departure? Richardson may have drawn from two different sources.
The great French academic school of art theory may well have been one
of them. Roger de Piles could have provided the legitimation of intro-
ducing the notion of the sublime into a discussion of painting. As I have
already said, his Art of Painting (the original edition of which was
published in 1699, and the English translation in 1706, only nine years
before Richardson published his Essay) mentions the sublime in a short
chapter speaking of the Grand Gusto. “In painting,” he says there, “the
grand Gusto, the Sublime and the Marvellous are one and the same
thing.” ''* Yet though Roger de Piles’s authority was important, the
content of that brief chapter is rather meager.
Another source of inspiration, though less direct, may prove to have
been more decisive. The Longinian tradition in England, traced with
much understanding by Samuel Monk,''*® made visual experience the
major stimulus of the feeling of sublimity. The emphasis on the visual
in evoking the sublime was articulated during the very years Jonathan
Richardson conceived and wrote his Essay on the Theory of Painting. | shall
illustrate this process by one example, the writings of Joseph Addison
(1672-1719). Although writers like Shaftesbury and others had been
discussing the Sublime, so Walter John Hipple, Jr., writes in his inter-

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esting and instructive study, “it was Addison’s Essay on the Pleasures of the
Imagination which formulated the problem of aesthetics in such a fashion
as to initiate that long discussion of beauty and sublimity.” ''® Addison
did not use the term “sublime,” perhaps, as Samuel Monk believes,
because it had a definitely rhetorical ring; instead, like Roger de Piles,
he employed the term “great.” He distinguished between the great, the
uncommon, and the beautiful. In the discussion of the first, he repeat-
edly stresses both the transcending of boundaries (the essence of the
sublime) and the visual origin of this process. “By greatness,” he
explains, “I do not only mean the bulk of any single object, but the
largeness of a whole view considered as one entire piece.” Such plea-
sures of the imagination, by which “we are flung into a pleasing
astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness
and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them,” arise “origi-
nally from sights.” Among the examples of such grandeur he mentions
“a troubled ocean, a heaven adorned with stars and meteors, or a
spacious landscape cut out into rivers, woods, rocks, and meadows.” A?
But do these visual affinities of the sublime also affect man-made
objects, or are they restricted to untouched nature? The object that
immediately offers itself for inspection is the garden. Around 1700, that
well-known discussion began concerning the character and shape of the
garden, a discussion in the course of which the “formal,” tailored
garden that reached its apogee in seventeenth-century France was
juxtaposed with the seemingly “wild” type known all over Europe as
the “English Garden.” ''® As Panofsky has reminded us in a delightful
study, Shaftesbury had already taken part in that discussion, speaking
out in favor of “all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as
representing Nature more.” Addison, criticizing artificial regularity,
cites the Chinese who “choose rather to show a genius in works of this
nature. ...” Echoing the tradition of revolting against mathematical
rules, he says that he “would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy
and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and
trimmed into a mathematical figure.” He, too, distinguishes between
nature and art. “If we consider the works of nature and art, as they are
qualified to entertain the imagination,” he writes, “we shall find the last
very defective in comparison with the former; for though they may

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appear sometimes beautiful or strange, they can have nothing in them

of the vastness and immensity.” But even he makes an attempt to
bridge the gap, at least in some respect, between nature and art. In
speaking of the pleasures of imagination, or fancy, he says, “I here mean
such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in
our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings,
statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.” ''? The work of art, it
would seem to follow from what Addison says, may be inferior to
nature itself, yet it is capable of stimulating the rapture of the sublime.
When we look into the specific character of the Longinian tradition
in England, Richardson’s introduction of the Sublime into the theory of
painting appears less out of context. The difference between the visual
experience of nature and of the picture that represents a piece of nature
is after all not an abysmal gap that cannot be bridged. But dealing with
the sublime in the context of painting would seem to compel the author
to be more specific about the practical meaning of the notions he is
using. What indeed, in Richardson’s view, is the Sublime in painting?
Were we to take his theoretical formulations at face value, it would be
difficult to find a clear answer to this question. His philosophical
“definitions,” as far as one may call them so, suggest that he was not
too clear in his mind about what the sublime may actually signify in a
painter’s workshop. Were we to follow his abstract definitions only, we
would have to understand the sublime simply as the excellent or
outstanding, a degree of excellence rather than a distinct character or
quality. In the preface to the second, enlarged edition of the Essay,
Richardson declares, in a context that would suggest the sublime, the
superiority of “a fine Thought, Grace, and Dignity” to “the Lesser, to
the more Mechanical Parts of the Picture.” The sublime is rather
generally defined as “the most Excellent of what is Excellent, as the
Excellent is the Best of what is Good.” In other words, the sublime is
just another rung in the ladder of achievement, it is some kind of a
“superexcellent.” In discussing the sublime in literature, Richardson
seems to be a little more specific, suggesting some social and psycholog-
ical characteristics that have an intrinisic orientation. Here he claims
that the sublime is “the Greatest, and most Noble thought, Images, or
Sentiments, Convey’d to us in the Best chosen Words.” Nobility and

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greatness are not just excellence; they have a specific character. But
where Richardson provides abstract definitions of the sublime in paint-
ing, such character is lacking.
In coming closer to actual painting, Richardson’s text gets more
specific; it bears ample testimony to the various facets of that great
transformation to modern thought that dominated the period. This
becomes particularly evident in a small, seemingly technical detail. The
reader is struck by Richardson’s renunciation of the careful finish of the
picture, a hallowed value in the workshop tradition. The sublime can
be expressed, so it follows from what our author says, in a sketch, a
drawing, or a finished picture. No preference is given to the completed
work over the other forms, which for centuries were considered only
as records of the creative process, not as its result. The craftman’s pride
in the fine polish characteristic of the finished picture was particularly
strong in northern Europe. To see that this was still true in Richardson’s
generation, it is enough to recall what Gérard de Lairesse had to say
about brushstrokes: the finished painting, ready to be taken out of the
workshop and presented to the public, is that where no trace of
brushstroke can be seen, where no vestiges remain of the process
whereby the work was shaped. '° Gérard was not being polemical in
stressing this point, he was simply repeating what was an article of faith
in the workshop mentality. When Richardson places—at least with
regard to the sublime—the finished work on the same level as the
sketch and the drawing, he undermines this mentality. In fact, earlier in
the Essay the problem of the brushstroke and the final polish had already
appeared. There Richardson treated it as a merely mechanical part of
the painter’s job; he has to adjust the brushstroke to the conditions
under which the work will be seen.'*! In small pictures, meant to be
seen from close by, brushstrokes should be delicate and carefully worked
into each other, making for a surface that will be fine and smooth. In
large-scale pictures, intended to be seen from a greater distance, the
brushstrokes can be rougher, the workmanship more sketchy. These
views, even if not always orthodox in their time, are still in accordance
with the craftman’s ethos. But what he says about the finish with regard
to the sublime goes beyond that mentality, which had so stubbornly

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

persisted over many centuries. The present-day reader cannot help

recognizing a specifically modern attitude.
Richardson’s notion of the sublime in art is not easily derived from
his definitions or general concepts; it is best grasped by looking at the
pictorial examples he selects for review. He took his examples seriously,
much thought going into selecting them. “I might have given examples
to my Purpose from the Works of several other Masters,” he writes at
the end of a lengthy passage dealing with Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder
Print, “but 1 made choice of This, not only as being at least Equally
remarkable with the Best | could have found, but to do Justice. ...”
The example, then, represents a great deal of meditation. Its significance
also follows from the fact that painting defies description. Who can
describe with words, Richardson rhetorically asks, what Raphael, Guido
Reni, or Van Dyck did with their brushes? To explain the sublime in
painting, he also relies on works of art.
His first example is a drawing by Rembrandt, now in the Municipal
museum in Bayonne, and identified as St. Peter’s Prayer before the Raising
of Tabitha. Richardson then owned the drawing, and from his description
one can guess how often and carefully he contemplated it. (That he
didn’t get the iconography right is obvious). The artist, our author says,
“has given such an Idea of a Death-Bed in one Quarter of a Sheet of
Paper in two figures with few Accompagnements, and in Clair-Obscure
only, that the most Eloquent Preacher cannot paint it so strongly by
the most Elaborate Discourse; I do not pretend to Describe it, it must
be Seen.” Nevertheless he goes on to describe the major features of the
composition. “An Old Man is lying on his Bed, just ready to Expire. . . .
the Son of this Dying Old Man is at Prayers ... (there is) such a
Touching Solemnity, and Repose that these Equal anything in the Arts.
..” The praying figure thinks: “Oh God! What is this World! Life
passes away like a Tale that is Old.” ve
The other example Richardson adduces to illustrate the sublime in
painting is Federico Zuccari’s Annunciation. Neither the angel nor the
Virgin is particularly remarkable, the author admits; but an indication
of the sublime is found in the open space, in the vast sky in which God
the Father and an infinite number of angels appear. It is obvious from

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 Modern Theories of Art

his description that it is not these heavenly figures that attract his
attention, but the open vastness itself. Now, vastness has always been
conceived as one of the constitutive elements of the sublime. In English
literature, as Marjorie Nicolson reminds us in her stimulating discussion
of the “Aesthetics of the Infinite,”’!*? it is attributed to God. “Those
distances belong to Thee,” > said the poet George Herbert in the early
seventeenth century. “Magnificence, vastness, ruin,” to follow Miss
Nicholson’s quotations, is particularly characteristic of the sublime. In
the mid-eighteenth century, as we need hardly remark, Edmund Burke
made vastness a definite category of the sublime. Richardson’s focusing
on the vast sky rather than on the participating figures in Zuccari’s
Annunciation has, then, a venerable ancestry.
On what does Richardson concentrate in his description of pictures,
such as Rembrandt’s drawing and Zuccari’s painting? The question is
not as odd as it may appear at first glance. We still do not have a
systematic investigation of the structure and literary forms of the
descriptions of paintings, and therefore any observation of changes
occurring in that field is necessarily based on impressions. We shall
however be not too far off the mark when we say that the major type
of painting description (or ekphrasis, as it was called in Antiquity) relates
the painting as an action performed or as an event taking place. This
narrative structure of the description may to some extent go back to
the Aristotelian formula that the objects of imitation are the actions of
men; it was surely further promoted by the rhetorical tradition. Ever
since the Renaissance it had been the central way of reading a picture.
When we compare this pattern of description with Richardson’s way of
giving an account of a work, we cannot help feeling a certain shift of
emphasis. What he describes is less a specific action than the general air
pervading the painting, an intangible quality. Moreover, that general air
is one that admittedly transcends the describable, such as the terror of
death or the unlimited vastness of the open spaces. To be sure, Richard-
son was not the first author to use, or suggest, such qualities in
descriptions of paintings. Even in the most typical Renaissance descrip-
tions, such as those given by Vasari, one finds adumbrations of the
ineffable. But a careful reading of Richardson leaves us with the impres-
sion that for him the hinting at the ineffable, the suggestion of what

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cannot be fully portrayed, is the core both of paintings and of their

descriptions.

NOTES

. See, for example, Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New
York, 1967), pp. 149 ff.
. In the entry dated March S$, 1787, of his “Journey to Italy” Goethe writes about
the Scienza Nuova: “In [his] fathomless depths the newer Italian legists greatly
refresh themselves. Upon a cursory perusal of the book [Vico’s Scienza nuova]
which they communicated to me as a holy work, it seemed to contain sibylline
presages of the good and the true. . .”
. See B. Croce, Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistics, trans. D.
Ainslie (New York, n.d.), pp. 220 ff. (Chapter V). See also Croce’s Die Philosophie
Giambattista Vicos (Tiibingen, 1927), p. 40. Somewhat similar views have also been
expressed in British philosophy. See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New
York, 1958; original edition 1938), p. 138.
. Iam here following the distinctions proposed by Isaiah Berlin in Vico and Herder:
Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York, 1977), pp. 45 ff. See also R.
Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (Notre Dame,
Ind., 1953), esp. pp. 167, 173 ff. Discussions that are of value if our context may
be found in the two volumes of Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. G. Tagliacozzo,
M. Mooney, and D. P. Verene (Atlantic Highlands, N. J., 1979).
. The figures in parentheses, after quotations from Vico, refer to the number of
the paragraph (not of the page), a system introduced by Fausto Niccolini in his
1953 edition of the Scienza nuova. This numeration has been taken over in the
English edition. See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas
Bergin and M. Fisch (Ithaca, N. Y., 1968), from which all our quotations are
taken.
. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(Oxford, 1971; originally published in 1953), pp. 285 ff.
. Quoted in L. Formigari, “Linguistic Theories in British Seventeenth Century
Philosophy,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P. Wiener (New York, 1973),
III, p. 75.
. See Berlin, Vico and Herder, p. 104; Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 285.
. In Scienza nuova, 188, which corresponds to the passage just quoted, Vico speaks
of a “golden Passage” in Lactance. And cf. Lactance, The Divine Institutes 1,
Chapter 15 (in The Works of Lactantius, translated by W. Fletcher [Edinburgh,
1871], pp. 40 ff.
10. Cf. my Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann (New York, 1985), pp. 263 ff,
for context and further literature.

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 Modern Theories of Art

. For Montfaucon and other antiquarians, see below, pp. 43 ff.

12 See A. Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), p. 19.
133 By Berlin, in Vico and Herder, p. 106.
. By Francis Coleman, The Aesthetic Attitude of the French Enlightenment (Pittsburgh,
1971), p. 15. See also the brief characterization of Dubos in André Fontaine, Les
doctrines d’art en France: Peintres, amateurs, critiques de Poussin a Diderot (Geneva,
1970; original edition, Paris, 1909), pp. 197-203.
. A. Lombard, L’Abbé Du Bos: Un initiateur de la pensée moderne (Geneva, 1969;
originally Paris, 1913), pp. 313 ff, carefully surveys the impact made by the
Réflexions critiques on contemporary Europe.
16. Theories of Art, pp. 203 fee Or:
Ff. For reference purposes, I shall use the reprint Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la
poésie et sur la peinture (Geneva, 1967). In quoting, | shall first give the page
number of the reprint and then, in parentheses, the volume and page number of
the original edition. The sentence just quoted may be found on p. 13 (I, 22).
. Cf. Tertullian’s “The Shows, or De spectaculis,’ ’ translated into English by S.
Thelwall, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, IV (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1976), pp. 79-91.
. Réflexions critiques, p. 14 (1, 26 ff).
. Réflexions critiques, pp. 13 ff. (I, 25 ff). It is Section III of the first volume that is
devoted to this problem and that lays out the fundamentals of Dubos’s psychol-
ogy of the spectator.
Dire For a brief survey of Le Brun’s theory, cf. Theories of Art, pp. 330 ff.
22, Réflexions critiques, p. 15 (I, 30 ff.). Dubos applies the words quoted to a tragedy
by Racine, but since he speaks of Le Brun’s painting in the very same paragraph,
the statement obviously refers also to him. The precise formulation is worth
quoting: “‘C’est, sans nous attrister réellement, que la piece de Racine fait couler
des larmes de nos yeux: l’affliction n’est, pour ainsi dire, que sur la superficie de
notre coeur.”
23: Réflexions critiques, p. 14 (I, 29).
24. For Poussin’s theory of délectation, see Theories of Art, pp. 324 ff.
2S: The passage occurs in Quintilian, Institutio oratoria X,ii,11, and is quoted by
Dubos in Réflexions critiques, p. 14 (I, 28 f.).
26. Réflexions critiques, p. 14 (I, 28).
ile Ibid., p. 120 (I, 451 ff.). This is Section XLIII, which bears the title “Que la
plaisir que nous avons au Théatre n’est point produit par illusion.”
28. Réflexions critiques, p. 121 (I, 454 ff).
IE). Ibid., pp. 120 f. (1, 453 ff).
30. For Lessing, see below, Chapter 3, pp. 149 ff.
ail. Réflexions critiques, p. 29 (1, 87).
323 Ibid., p. 113 (1, 424).
33} Ibid., p. 30 (I, 91 ff).
34. Ibid., p. 31 (1, 96).
SE), Ibid., I, Section XIII, pp. 28-35 (I, 84-112).
36. Ibid., pp. 110 fF. (I, 413 ff).

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

37. Ibid., p. 111 (1, 414 ff). Painting, Dubos says here, employs signs which “ne sont
pas des signes arbitraires et institués, tels que sont les mots dont la Poésie se
sert.” I am not aware of any modern study of Dubos’ concept of signs that
would take into consideration the significance of the concept for the theory of
painting at the time.
38. Réflexions critiques, p. 111 (1, 415) and p. 33 (I, 105).
3: Ibid., p. 111 (I, 414).
40. Ibid., p. 112 (I, 421).
41. Institutio oratoria V1, ii, 29—30.
42. Rensselaer Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York,
1967) frequently refers to Dubos in the discussion of this well-known theme.
43. See Theories of Art, pp. 263 ff., for a brief summary, from the point of view of art
theory, of the allegorical literature in the period between the late Renaissance
and Dubos’ generation.
44, Dubos presents his views on allegory in Section XXIV of the first volume of his
great work. See Réflexions critiques, pp. 55-63 (1, 190-222). The definition of an
allegorical figure is found at the beginning of the chapter, p. 55 (I, 191).
45. The “personnages allegoriques” of the first kind, he says on p. 55 (I, 192), are
those “inventés depuis longtemps, et que tout le monde reconnoit pour ce qu’ils
sont. Ils ont acquis pour ainsi dire, le droit de bourgeoisie parmi le genre humain”
(italics in the original).
46. Réflexions critiques, 55 (I, 193).
47. Ibid., p. 58 (I, 203).
48. Ibid., p. 55 (I, 203 f.).
49. Ibid., p. 60 (I, 210).
50. Cf. Manuel’s discussion of eighteenth-century religion and atheism (see note 1)
and, particularly, A. Lombard, L’Abbé Du Bos (see note 15), pp. 53 ff.
Sir For Pierre Bayle’s influence on Dubos, see Lombard, L’Abbé Du Bos, pp. 53-68.
52. Though Shaftesbury is frequently refered to in histories of aesthetics, his contri-
bution to the thought on art does not seem to have received sufficient study.
This is particularly true of his views on painting and sculpture. Stimulating are
Ernst Cassirer’s views in his Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951). For
Shaftesbury’s opinions on the artist and his creative imagination, cf. James Engell,
The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). Grete Sternberg, Shaftesburys
Aesthetik (Breslau, 1915), attempts a characterization of the individual arts ac-
cording to Shaftesbury.
53. For Shaftesbury’s theory of beauty, see mainly his Advice to an Author, passim,
esp. Part 2, section 2, and Part 3, section 3. The edition used here is Characteris-
ticks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times by Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (1732), Vol.
I, pp. 239 ff, 353. For the dangers inherent in beauty, see Advice, Part 1, section
2, pp. 183 ff.
54. Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena of an
Interpretation of the Word ‘‘Stimmung”’ (Baltimore, 1963).
Yi. See especially A Letter Concerning Design, in Characteristicks, III, pp. 393 ff Note

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 Modern Theories of Art

what Shaftesbury says on the artist’s “liberty,” pp. 402 ff References to the
artist’s freedom are found in most of Shaftesbury’s writings.
56. See Theories of Art, pp. 291 ff, with references to further literature.
57. See Soliloquy: Or, Advice to An Author, Part 1, section 3 (Characteristicks, 1, pp.
207 ff.). For Shaftesbury’s admiration of Prometheus, see also The Moralists: A
Rhapsody, Part 1, section 2 (Characteristicks, Il, pp. 192 ff., 201 ff). To the question
of why mankind has so many follies and so much perverseness, Shaftesbury
replies (ironically): “Prometheus was the Cause. The plastick Artist, with his
unlucky Hand, solv’d all” (p. 201).
58. See Miscellaneous Reflections, Miscellany 1V, Chapter 1 (Characteristicks, Ill, pp.
189 ff, esp. pp. 192 ff.). See also Advice to an Author, Part 1, section 3, and Part
3, section 1 (Characteristicks, 1, pp. 170 ff., 282 ff).
59. See Shaftesbury’s A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (Characteristicks, 1, pp. 3-55).
60. For the problem in general, see Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical
Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960; originally published in
1935). And see particularly pp. 164-202 for “‘The Sublime in Painting.”
61. See Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York, 1959).
62. See also her entries “Literary Attitudes Towards Mountains” and “The Sublime
in External Nature” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P. Wiener, (New York,
1973), Ill, pp. 253-260, and IV, pp. 333-337.
63. See The Moralists, Part 3, section 2 (Characteristicks, II, p. 396).
64. For the best survey of the problems raised by the historical phenomenon of the
antiquarians, though seen mainly from the point of view of general. historiogra-
phy, see Momigliano’s study “Ancient History and the Antiquarian” in A.
Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), pp. 1-39 (originally
published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 [1950]: 285—
315).
65. See Illustrissimi E. Spanheimii ... Dissertationes de praestanta et usu Numismatum
antiquorum. Editio nova . . . (Amsterdam, 1717).
66. Jacques Spon, Réponse 4 la critique publiée par M. Guillet (Lyon, 1679).
67. J. Addison, “Dialogues upon the usefulness of ancient models,” in his Miscella-
neous Works, III (Oxford, 1830), pp. 59-199.
68. The author was Fr. Bianchini. The work appeared in 1697.
69. For a brief but authoritative review of Baldinucci’s work and significance, see J.
von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur (Vienna, 1924), pp. 418 ff.
70. See Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art (New Haven and London,
1985).
ALE Idea of the Perfect Painter, in Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting and the Lives of the
Painters (London, 1706), pp. 67 ff.
1P* The Art of Painting, pp. 68.
73. Though dealing with literature only, Andre Jolles, Einfache Formen (Halle a. S.,
1930) can be productive for the theory of art as well.
74. See “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship” in Richard
Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 177-201.

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 The Early Eighteenth Century

dos The Art of Painting, p. 70.

76. Richardson, Pére et Fils, Traité de la peinture et de la sculpture (Amsterdam, 1728;
reprinted Geneva, 1972), I, p. 7 (p. 15 of reprint).
Tie Christ’s monograph was published in Acta erudita et curiosa (Nuremberg, 1726).
And cf. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 1, Von Sandrart bis Rumohr
(Leipzig, 1921), pp. 45 ff.
78. A. J. Dezaillier d’Argensville, Abrégé des vies des peintres (n.p., 1745). Already in
1768 a German translation appeared in print. And see André Fontaine, Les
doctrines d’art en France (Paris, 1909; reprinted Geneva, 1970), pp. 191-196.
72: For Hippolyte Taine, see below, pp. 320 ff.
80. Nicolas Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 140 ff.
81. For a modern assessment of Gérard’s book, cf. Georg Kauffmann, “Studien zum
grossen Malerbuch des Gérard de Lairesse,” Jahrbuch fur Aesthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft II (1953): 153-196.
82. I quote from the French edition: Gérard de Lairesse, Le grand livre des peintres ou
l'art de la peinture consideré dans toutes ses parties, et demonstré par principes . . . (Paris,
1787; reprinted Geneva, 1972). It will hereafter be referred to as Grand livre.
Roman numerals refer to the book, Arabic to the chapter of the original edition;
numbers in parentheses refer to the volume and page of the reprint.
83. Leon Battista Alberti on Painting, translated by John Spencer (New Haven and
London, 1966), p. 43.
84. Grand livre |, 1 (1, 51).
85. Ibid., I, 1 (I, 55).
86. Ibid., VII, 1 (II, 133).
87. Ibid., I, 1 (1, 53).
88. Nicolas Poussin: Lettres et propos sur l'art, ed. A. Blunt (Paris, 1964), pp? 123-125.
And see Theories ofArt, pp. 329 ff., with additional literature.
89. Henri Testelin, Sentiments les plus habiles des peintres sur la pratique de la peinture et
sculpture mis en table de préceptes (Paris, 1780). See Theories of Art, pp. 338 ff.
90. Alberti on Painting, p. 72.
De See Jean Seznec, “Diderot and Historical Painting,” in E. R. Wasserman (ed.),
Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 129-142, especially pp.
129 ff.
92. For brief summaries of academic thought on the hierarchy of pictorial genres,
see Fontaine, Les doctrines d'art en France, pp. 56 ff., and Karl Borinski, Die Antike
in Poetik und Kunsttheorie, 1] (Leipzig, 1921), pp. 98, 101. And see also Theories of
Art, pp. 342 ff.
BS. Grand livre V1, 1 (II, 1): “La variété est l’ame du plaisir et la source des toutes les
sensations agréables.”
94. The three scenes are described in Grand livre VI, 12 (II, 59-83). For the
description of the site, see pp. 59 ff.
95: Ibid., VI, 12 (II, 68 ff.).
96. Ibid., VI, 12 (II, 77 ff). For the description of the natural scenery, see particu-
larly p. 80.
OT Ibid., XI, 1 (II, 473 ff). The sentence quoted is on p. 474.

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98. See Hegel’s Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik, edited by Hotho (see Hegel’s Werke, Vol.
X, Part III [Berlin, 1831]), pp. 120 ff.
99! Grand livre IX, 1 (II, 315 ff.).
100. Ibid., VIII, 6 (II, 209-210).
101. Kauffmann, “Studien zum grossen Malerbuch” (see above, note 81), pp. 168 ff.
102. Grand livre XI, 1 (II, 473 ff.). For the definition quoted, see p. 474.
103. Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York,
1978), pp. 18 ff. The article from which the quotation is taken is Schapiro’s
well-known essay “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-
life.”
104. Grand livre XI, 1 (II, 475).
105. Ibid., XI, 3 (II, 484 ff).
106. Ibid., XI, 3 (II, 476).
107. Ibid., XI, 3 (II, 477 ff).
108. Gérard de Lairesse devotes a special “book” to flower painting (Grand livre XII
[II], 587—508]), something that was not common in this type of literature.
Throughout the “book,” he refers to the symbolic meaning of flowers and to the
feasibility of conveying a message by the proper arrangement of flowers.
109. Grand livre XI, 3 (II, 480).
110. For Richardson’s influence on the culture and art theory of his time, see G. W.
Snelgrove, The Work and Theories ofJonathan Richardson (London, 1936).
le Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting, p. 19.
Hk I am using the French edition (see above, note 76). For the discussion of the
sublime, see I, pp. 182—216 (pp. 59-67 of reprint).
Luss Longinus on the Sublime, translated by H. L. Havell (London, 1953), Chapter
XXXVI.
114. Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting, p. 19.
1S: Samuel Monk, The Sublime, especially Chapter 1, pp. 10 ff.
116. See W. J. Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century
British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, Ill., 1957).
IU See The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, (London, 1811), IV, pp.
336 ff, 340 fF. (Spectator, # 411 [June, 21] and # 412 [June 23]) 1712. And cf.
Engell, The Creative Imagination, pp. 36 ff.
118. For the wider significance of the two garden types, see Erwin Panofsky, “On the
Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 107 (1963): 273-288.
WNC). Addison, Works, IV, p. 336.
120. Grand livre 1, 1 (reprint I, 55).
Wl Richardson, Pére et Fils, Traité de la peinture et de la sculpture (Amsterdam, 1728;
reprinted Geneva, 1972), I, pp. 131 ff. (reprint, p. 46).
lL Richardson, Traité de la peinture, |, pp. 204 f. (reprint, p. 64).
123. Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (see above, note 61).

88
 2.

Beginnings of the New Age

What scholars call “periodization,” that is, the division of the broad,
continuous stream of history into “distinguishable portions,” is the
historian’s task and burden. Students of all periods and ages will invest
great intellectual effort and critical acumen in marking the “limits” of
the periods they study, in establishing when and where they begin and
end. It is particularly the “beginnings” that cast a magic spell, and the
more so when the search is for the emergence of our own time and
world. As we have already noted, in the limited domain of reflection on
painting and sculpture, the new age began in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century. In the opening pages of this book I have indicated that,
to a fairly large extent, we can pinpoint the time and conditions in
which modern art theory was born. Within a single decade, roughly
between 1756 and 1767, ideas emerged and forms of reflection and
study were shaped that decisively determined the thought on the visual
arts for the next two centuries. Turning to this decade, we naturally
have many questions. Where did the impulses for the new thought
come from, and what were the conditions—social, cultural, institu-
tional—that made it possible for the new ideas to develop? Did the
various efforts undertaken during this short span have a common
theme, or was it only their long-lasting effect, as felt over the centuries,
that brings them together in our mind?

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I. MENGS

Abstract theory and contemplation surely played a part in preparing the

ground for a new reflection on art. The “founder” of modern aesthetics,
the first author to speak of aesthetica as a field of experience and of study
in its own right, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, was a professor at a
scholastic university — this at a time, one should add, when the univer-
sity was not at the peak of its fame. Drawing upon the established
tradition of systematic, though rather dry, reasoning, it is his historic
achievement to have prepared the ground for an explicit philosophical
discussion of the arts. The great impulses of creative renewal in the
theory of painting and sculpture, however, came from different quar-
ters, among them from the workshop of the practicing artist and from
the studies and collections of the learned antiquarian and literary
interpreter of ancient art. The interaction between these two types, the
painter and the antiquarian, is magnificently represented by the close, if
complex, relationship between A. R. Mengs and H. J. Winckelmann. !
The work of the two men was, at least in some respects, so closely
intertwined that any attempt to decide who came first and who second,
the painter or the antiquarian, is bound to fail. Let us for a moment
recall some of the dates. In 1750, Baumgarten published the first volume
of Aesthetica, in 1758 the second. Two years before the second volume
could have reached the bookshops and its few but avid readers, Winck-
elmann published his first treatise, the slim volume that was to exert
such a wide influence, the Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of
Painting and Sculpture (1755). At about the same time, Anton Raphael
Mengs (1728-1779), a German painter who lived in Rome, began
writing down his reflections on the classical statues and Renaissance
paintings that made the Eternal City a center of art. In 1762 these
reflections were published as Gedanken iiber die Schénheit und den Geschmack
in der Mahlerey.* The book was dedicated to Winckelmann, and Karl
Justi, the great nineteenth-century Winckelmann scholar, declared that
it would be difficult to separate the “insights of Mr. Mengs”’ from those
of Winckelmann. Two years later, in 1764, the History of Ancient Art
appeared in print. Winckelmann’s fame has—rightly, one should say

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— overshadowed that of many of his contemporaries, including Mengs.

It may be useful, however, to make some acquaintance with Meng’s
theory of art before we approach the imposing work of Winckelmann.
In his notes, Mengs made several significant contributions to thought
on art as it was known in his time. He was deeply concerned with art
as a body of thought, and fascinated by the ‘“‘painters-philosophers”
(Malerdenker) of ancient Greece.’ Art should be understood as a compre-
hensive structure, free from anecdotal as well as from merely individual
elements. Having been asked to write a vita of the painter Tempesta,
Mengs replied, on September 1, 1756: ““We have enough vite of painters.
To my mind it would be better to replace them by a history of art.””*
But though Mengs, president of the Academy of Art in Rome, and a
classicist painter famous throughout Europe for his murals, moves easily
in the realm of art theory, that is, in the domain situated between
purely conceptual, abstract notions of art and the actual execution of a
painting on a canvas or a wall, his heart does not lie with merely
philosophical deliberation. That he could not avoid such deliberations
altogether probably resulted less from his natural inclinations than from
the culture within which he was raised and was working. Eighteenth-
century education in the arts involved a good deal of Platonic talk.
Though we should not take such talk too literally, the impact of
philosophical ideas on the artists’ world cannot be disregarded. Mengs’s
attempts to cast the abundance of artistic forms, the variety of concrete
styles into a theoretical pattern, into a comprehensive system of art, are
typical of the interpenetration of concrete data and conceptual systems
prevailing in the art and culture of the time.
In reading Mengs’s reflections one observes that he has two systems
rather than one. He makes extensive use of the concepts he inherited
from Renaissance art theory, based on a system that in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries was usually known as that of the “parts of painting.”
Mengs was following Renaissance tradition closely when he divided
painting into five parts: drawing, light and shadow, color, invention,
and composition. ° What he has to say under these headings contains
little that is new or goes beyond the limits of the Renaissance heritage.
His other system shows greater originality, and it bears the imprint
of Mengs’s own time. Here our author attempts to distill a few distinct

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styles from the wealth of artistic impressions presenting themselves in

Italy and to arrange them in some clear order. He conceives these styles
as primeval patterns or aboriginal manners of depiction. Delineating
them becomes a mapping of the basic possibilities of shaping art. Let us
remember that Mengs does not arrange these styles in chronological
order, nor does he try to show how one style may lead to another.
Hegel’s philosophical goal, to show that historical transformations are
the manifestations of a conceptual structure, still lay in the distant
future. The styles that Mengs discusses are all timeless possibilities of
shaping the work, and the world, of art; they are always present, and
therefore they coexist. In this trend of thought, Mengs also follows a
late sixteenth-century model. Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s allegorical Temple
of Painting rests on seven columns. Each column, we remember, repre-
sents a painter, a style, a mineral, and so on. Since the temple rests on
all seven columns, they are obviously imagined as coexisting. Mengs
does not employ such images as the allegorical temple, but he envisages
the different styles as simultaneous patterns. What, then, are these
primeval styles?
The “high style” (der hohe Stil), possibly to be translated as the
“sublime,” comes first in Mengs’s chart. It is in this style that elevated,
or sublime, subjects are embodied and made available to our visual
experience and intelligible to our minds. Mengs’s reflections on the
“high style” probably belong to the earliest discussions of the sublime
by a painter and in the context of painting. He himself was a neoclassi-
cal painter, and so he naturally looked for ancient models. Yet, studying
Greek and Roman paintings, he is struck and confused by what he
finds. We just don’t have ancient models for the “high style” in
painting, he discovers. This is so, he explains, because what we have of
Greek painting is fragmentary, and, in consequence, our mental image
of that great art is not sufficiently clear. With sculpture the situation is
different. Here Greek models have come down to us, and among them
the Apollo Belvedere, particularly revealing. But Mengs is a painter, and
painting remains at the center of his attention. He therefore goes on to
show that what Greek painting does not give us, the Renaissance
provides in abundance: examples and models of the “high style.” Thus,
in “modern art,” Raphael has raised the “high style” to a level that

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Mengs calls “the majestic.” To the same category also belongs Michel-
angelo’s work, displaying the quality of terribilita. Now, picking out
these particular masters is not new, nor is Mengs’s characterization of
their styles original. What is new, however, is that Raphael and Michel-
angelo, instead of being juxtaposed as embodying “grace” versus terribi-
lita, are now jumped together in one category, the one Mengs calls “high
style.” One cannot help feeling that the appearance of the sublime on
the intellectual horizon of aesthetics involved a fundamental revision of
the historical picture that had been accepted for centuries.
The “beautiful style” (der schéne Stil) is another of the primeval styles.
In expounding it, Mengs relies, to a greater extent than in most of his
other discussions, on traditional Neoplatonic ideas and literary imagery.
Absolute perfection is unattainable by human beings, it rests with God
alone; but God has impressed upon us the ability to perceive—and, by
implication, to produce—a visible manifestation of that perfection.
That manifestation is beauty. A work of art shaped in the “beautiful
style,” one is tempted to understand, both adumbrates the ineffable
perfection of God and suggests the eternal human failure to achieve it.
But how can one define beauty? It is harder to describe beauty than all
the other characteristics that form the basis of various styles, actually
one can only paraphrase it. It is interesting that, in trying to describe
the ‘beautiful style,” Mengs stresses highly subjective qualities. Works
of art created in that style, he says, are delicate, gentle or mild, free
from anything superfluous. The impression the reader obtains is that of
a noble, gentle, and soothing harmony becoming an ideal of beauty.
What Mengs more specifically had in mind in speaking of the
“beautiful style” we may guess by considering the examples he men-
tions. Annibale Carracci attains beauty in his depiction of male bodies,
Francesco Albani in his rendering of female bodies, Guido Reni in his
representation of female heads. As far as concrete, historical develop-
ments are concerned, Mengs’s examples amount to a glorification of the
academic trend in early Baroque Rome. In trying to present Mengs’s
proclamations in a conceptual form, one cannot help emphasizing the
expressive, or suggestive, character of the beautiful style. Beauty is
described not in terms of measurable proportions but in terms of pure,
noble, and gentle qualities. One comes to the conclusion (which Mengs

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himself may well have avoided) that what will ultimately determine
beauty is the spectator’s own experience.
There is still another kind of beauty, namely gracefulness. In Mengs’s
chart of styles this kind of beauty is represented by what he calls the
“charming [or graceful] style” (der reizvolle Stil). Now, the distinction
between beauty and charm or grace, between bellezza and grazia, is of
course a well-known one, often encountered in the history of art
theory. Since Alberti, and particularly in the sixteenth century, it had
become a permanent feature in doctrines of painting. There is, however,
an important difference between Alberti, or even sixteenth-century
authors, and Mengs. For Alberti and his followers, Beauty itself is
conceived as an objective system of traceable, measurable shapes and
proportions, and from this kind of beauty grazia is set off as a special
kind of beauty, charming our eyes though it cannot be measured and
traced. Does this distinction still hold true for Mengs, after he has in
fact transformed Beauty itself into a quasi-subjective category?
Mengs describes the “charming style” by its expressive effects. Pic-
tures painted in this style evoke pleasure and liking, the manner is light
and lovely, the movements depicted are humble rather than proud. But,
once again, one learns more about the style from the examples illustrat-
ing it. Among works of ancient art, the Venus de’ Medici shows best what
“graceful beauty” is; in “modern art,” it is mainly Correggio’s work
that embodies this type of beauty. Here we should pause for a moment,
and look at Mengs’s attitude to Correggio. Except for Raphael, Mengs
revered Correggio above all others; he is more-strongly attracted by
Correggio than by any other artist. Correggio is “the noon” of art, and
ever since his death art has declined. What makes Correggio so unique?
It is a little difficult to get a satisfactory answer from a literal reading of
the text. Correggio, Mengs says, combines grace with greatness, dainti-
ness (or elegance) with truth. What probably lies behind these rather
general formulations is Mengs’s fascination with Correggio’s ability to
convey the fullness and directness of live experience. Is this a somewhat
dry academician’s longing to attain the sensuality of Correggio? In any
case, making Correggio the central exponent of the “charming style”
suggests that the characteristic features of this manner, in addition to

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lightness and humility, are strong sensory qualities and a direct, power-
ful appeal to the beholder. Subjective elements, however formulated,
become increasingly significant.
A fourth mode of painting is “the significant or expressive style.” A
literal interpretation of that label does not lead us anywhere. In the
almost universal formulation in which it is presented— “significant or
expressive” —this description fits a confusing variety of styles and
movements in the visual arts, and one can apply it to almost every
period in the history of art. To know what Mengs actually had in mind
we turn to the masters our author evokes to illustrate his meaning. The
central evidence for the “significant or expressive style” is found in
Raphael’s work. At first, this may seem a little surprising. We have just
seen that Raphael’s oeuvre illustrates the “high” as well as the “‘beauti-
ful style.” Obviously Mengs has different facets of Raphael’s art in
mind. But it seems that the “significant or expressive” is the major or
typical feature in that venerated master’s work. This indicates a certain
shift of emphasis in the appreciation and reading of Raphael. For
centuries, his art had been held up, described, and praised as the classic
example of grace in painting. There can be no doubt that Mengs was
intimately familiar with this characterization and with the time-honored
prestige it enjoyed. Why then did he diverge from this model? The
answer is that the meaning of the notions had changed. “Grace,” or
“charm,” now carry the strong sensual overtones endowed by the
choice of Correggio as an embodiment of this quality. Compared with
Correggio, Raphael’s art is solemn and even detached. It is the art of
noble, significant expression. But Mengs is anxious to stress that Raphael’s
distance from immediate sensuality has nothing to do with the cold and
empty intricacies of Mannerism. Raphael, he says, achieved the expres-
sion of heart and soul (Gemiit) without succumbing to affection.
All this tells us, though by inference rather than directly, that the
“significant or expressive style” largely overlaps with the heroic manner
that the Renaissance recommended for history painting. To be sure, a
Renaissance istoria was meant to include also what Mengs attributes to
the “high style.”” Now, in mid-eighteenth century, after the sublime in
art has come to be considered as a special category, “significant or
 Modern Theories of Art

expressive” subject matter and mode of painting are restricted to heroic

and dramatic art, but of a kind that does not attempt to suggest what
cannot be represented.
The “natural style” is still another of the primeval styles. It is
characteristic of the work of artists who render nature and reality “as
they are,” without trying to improve upon what we perceive in our
regular experience. The obvious origin of this characterization is
Aristotle’s Poetics. As we remember, Aristotle cutlines a hierarchy of the
men whose actions are imitated in plays: “it follows that we must
represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they
are.” And the philosopher himself compares this to painting. “It is the
same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are,
Pauson as less noble, Dionysus drew them to true life.” ° By Mengs’s
time, this well-known Aristotelian distinction, repeated on innumerable
occasions since the Renaissance, had become a trite, worn-out com-
monplace. From the literary formulation it would be very difficult to
gather what Mengs had in mind. Again, it is only the examples that
shed more specific light on the category. These are taken from two
historical schools, Dutch seventeenth-century painting, particularly Gerard
Dou, Rembrandt, and Teniers, and, even more so, Spanish painting,
especially Velasquez.
In the assessment of Dutch painting a certain difference— perhaps a
difference in tone rather than substance—between Mengs and Winck-
elmann cannot be overlooked. Winckelmann is less restrained in his
criticism and outright rejection of Dutch painting: In his Thoughts on the
Imitation he speaks critically of “Dutch forms and figures.” In the
subsequent Sendschreiben, he says, somewhat ironically, that the “so-
called Dutch forms and figures” may not, after all, be altogether devoid
of value. As Bernini used, and was useful, to caricature, so one may
derive some advantage from what is seen in Dutch painting. ’ As
compared to Winckelmann, Mengs is more restrained in his tone.

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I]. WINCKELMANN

The collected works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, written within

the span of barely one decade, between 1755 and 1767, constitute a
nodal point in the evolution of Western ideas on art. They mark, and
are part of, the turning point between the age that still followed the
humanistic tradition as a matter of course, and the modern age domi-
nated by the craving for originality and revolution. In the two centuries
that have elapsed since his work began its triumphal march into
European thought and letters, attitudes to Winckelmann have varied a
great deal: some have praised him as the critic who established the
study of art as an autonomous province, others have branded him, to
borrow Miss Butler’s phrase (to which we shall shortly revert), as the
initiator of the “tyranny of Greece over Germany.” All students will
agree, however, that in his work the ages met, and, to no mean degree
as a result of his work, that they parted. Since Alberti and Vasari, it can
be claimed without hesitation, no other teacher, scholar, and writer has
had a similar impact on reflection on the visual arts. Winckelmann’s
mark is clearly to be traced in a variety of domains. He is usually
reckoned among the authors who shaped modern literary German; he
was the pioneer and founder of modern archaeology; he had, mainly
through Herder, an enduring influence on the writing of history; in his
view of a culture developing “organically,” through an irreversible series
of periods, he adumbrated, and paved the way for, nineteenth-century
historicism; in initiating the “Greek revival,” he was a major force in
determining modern taste; finally, he was the first author to write a
book that in its title combines the terms “history” and “art,” the History
of Ancient Art (1764). These are only some of the domains that can
rightfully claim Winckelmann as their own. It is not for us here to
discuss the many different aspects of Winckelmann’s personality and
work. | shall only comment on his significance to the history of art
theory.
Winckelmann’s life has frequently been told, and there is no need to
repeat the story. Born in 1717 into abject poverty in a forlorn, backward

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Prussian village, he found his way to the summit of the refined Euro-
pean culture of his time, and of all ages. In 1755 he published his first
composition, Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of Painting and
Sculpture, and, eight years later, the History of Ancient Art. A few years
afterwards, in 1768, he was murdered in a senseless incident.®
Let us now turn to our proper subject, and ask: may we legitimately
treat Winckelmann in a discussion of art theory? Were we to tell the
story of archaeology, of antiquarian studies, or of the history of art, the
question would not arise. But we are here dealing with the particular
field of art theory. What is Winckelmann’s significance in the history of
that discipline?

I. WINCKELMANN AND THE ART OF HIS TIME

Winckelmann did not start with the study of art, he ended with it. His
beginnings, in actual life as well as in the structure of his intellectual
world, were in the area of the word. Originally he was concerned with
the Greek text (primarily of Homer), its exegesis and literary study.
The places where he began his intellectual career—villages, small
towns, and castles—did not have any art worth speaking of; it was
only when he had already defined his way as a scholar and interpreter
of the ancient world that he experienced, in Dresden, really great art,
and even then it was almost exclusively “modern” art, mainly Raphael.
It was only when he came to Rome that he encountered, and acquired
a familiarity with, ancient art.
Seen from the vantage point of today, it may sometimes seem that
the influence of Winckelmann’s work radically differs from what he
himself intended. It is primarily the academic world where his impact
is most strongly felt and where his legacy is most keenly studied. (Here
fate has played an ironic trick worth remembering: Winckelmann was
inclined to ridicule professors and the academic establishment.) We
consider him the father of archaeology and art history, a crucial figure
in the history of numismatics, and so on. His own motivations and
intentions, however, at least in the initial stage of his brief career, lay
somewhere else. His aim was to bring about a radical transformation in
the art of his time, a turnabout in the direction of artistic development.

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This is most clearly seen in his first pamphlet, the Thoughts on the Imitation.
Many of the passages in this influential fascicle make full sense when
we read them as explicitly addressed to the artists of his time, as a
theoretician’s attempt to direct painters and sculptors in their work.
One of his most famous sentences proclaimed: “The only way for us to
become great, yes, inimitable, if it is possible, is the imitation of the
Greeks.””? This endlessly quoted pronouncement contains concepts that
are firmly rooted in the tradition of practical and educational art theory
as it had been practiced since the early days of the Renaissance. To be
great, “if it is possible, inimitable,” was the goal towards which artists
had been educated since Leone Battista Alberti’s day. Further, the
creation of a work of art, or a comprehensive artistic opus, is carried
out by way of imitating models—this would have been taken for
granted by everyone holding a brush or a chisel in his hands. Addressing
the artist in such a way could have had one meaning only: it was an
attempt to change the character of the work of art.
In his attempts to influence practicing artists and to change the
direction of their development, Winckelmann did not remain in the
realm of generalities. Throughout the Thoughts on Imitation, and in a more
general sense in his whole work, he both criticized artists who repre-
sented styles he had rejected and held up for emulation a new model to
contemporary painters and sculptors. Criticism of the rejected and
presentation of the new model praised as the embodiment of perfection
are of course two sides of the same action. They both show that
Winckelmann was not content with theorizing; he wished to bring
about a change of direction in the art of his age.
Winckelmann’s strictures are sharply focused; at their center stands
Bernini. He disapproves of other artists as well, mainly of the seven-
teenth century, such as Jordaens (and Dutch painting in general) or
Caravaggio. But it is primarily in association with Bernini that the
principles of art are discussed. We must therefore ask what arouses this
dislike of Bernini. Now, Winckelmann never doubts the virtuosity of
the great Baroque sculptor, he never questions the master’s miraculous
ability to translate into stone or bronze what he has in his mind or
perceives in nature. The reason for his censure of Bernini is the
sculptor’s very conception of art. It is because of what he wants, and

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therefore also manages, to represent that he is condemned. The various

specific reproaches can be reduced to one basic argument: Bernini is
the artist of extreme subjectivism.
That subjectivism has many facets. One of them is the addiction to
an illusion-creating sculpture, another is the fascination with images
produced by chance, by an insignificant combination of circumstances.
Bernini, Winckelmann believes, effaces the line of demarcation between
nature and art. Quoting Baldinucci, Winckelmann asserts that, in Ber-
nini’s view, nature can provide all the beauties. “He prided himself on
having lost his preconceived opinion of the superiority of the Greeks,
which he had originally held because of the beauty of the Medicean
Venus, when after thorough study he discovered the same beauty in
nature itself.”'° In Winckelmann’s view, a modern scholar has said,
Bernini is the “Antichrist.” "!
The dangers of such subjectivism can be appreciated when one
realizes how strongly it appeals to the young. In lively, evocative terms
Winckelmann describes the taste of the young artists of his time.
“Nothing earns their applause but exaggerated poses and actions, ac-
companied by an insolent ‘dash’ that they regard as spiritedness, or
‘franchezza,’ as they say. Their favorite concept is ‘contrapposto,’ which
to them is the essence of everything that makes for artistic perfection.
They want their figures to have souls as eccentric as comets; to them
every figure is an Ajax and Capaneus.” 1ST tis perhaps because of these
tendencies in the art of his time that Winckelmann approaches Baroque
art as if it were the art of the present. Bernini, who, as we know, had
been dead for over two generations, is considered a contemporary, and
a dangerous one at that. It is this feeling of the immediate presence of
the past that gives Winckelmann’s argument a particular urgency, and
turns it into something more than an academic affair.
What remedy has Winckelmann to offer to the artists of his time?
His reaction to what he found in contemporary art is typical of the
great tradition of art theory that was the legacy of the Renaissance. He
does not concentrate on individual fallacies —or “errors,” as they were
then called—nor does he suggest individual remedies for these errors.
Not even specific, well-outlined corrective methods are proposed, such
as certain types of drawing, systems of coloring or carving. What our

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author presents to the artists of his time is an inclusive ideal of art and
culture. “Now the purest sources of art are open; fortunate he who
knows how to find them and to taste them. To seek these sources
means to go to Athens. . . .” 3
By holding up the Greeks as the redeeming model, as “the purest
sources” of art and culture, Winckelmann affected not only the art of
his time; he initiated, and to no mean degree helped to bring about, a
revolution in the image that had prevailed for centuries. To Europe,
from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the image of Antiquity was
clearly Rome-centered. Centuries of ecclesiastical policy, of pilgrimages
and legends, of sacred historiography and cultural activities in a variety
of fields had gradually built up this image. Ever since the Renaissance,
the same view had also been explicitly valid for the historical develop-
ment of the arts. A glance at Vasari is sufficient to show that for him
and for his audience it is a matter of course to consider Roman culture
and Roman art as the ultimate achievement of Antiquity. Rinascimento
dell’antichita, it goes without saying, is the revival of Roman antiquity
and Roman style. This vision of Antiquity persisted in the seventeenth
century, and it became crucial in the eighteenth. Montesquieu and
Gibbon attest, if any testimony be needed, how central the Roman past
and the Roman model are for their views of society and history. In
1725, Giambattista Vico claimed, without hesitation and without con-
tradiction, that it was the ancient Romans, not the Greeks, who were
the heroes of the ancient world.
At the very time that Winckelmann was praising Greece as the
climax of ancient culture, the veneration of Rome, specifically in its role
as the embodiment of antichitd, attained a unique artistic expression.
Since the 1740s, the architect and draftsman Giovanni Battista Piranesi
had been singing the praises of ancient Rome in his engravings. His
Vedute di Roma brought the grandeur of ancient Roman monuments to
educated collectors and readers all over Europe. In 1756, almost exactly
at the moment when Winckelmann’s Thoughts on Imitation became avail-
able to the very few readers for whom it was originally destined,
Piranesi published his Antichita romane, and in 1761 the splendid Della
magnificenza ed architettura de’ romani reached the markets. In these
publications Piranesi defended the patriotic claim that decoro e gravitd

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are genuine Roman qualities, that they are the result of the Roman
affinity for the sublime, and that they were known to Roman culture
before the Latins even encountered the Greeks.'*
It is against this background that we should weigh Winckelmann’s
claim that the true sources of originality and greatness in art are to be
found in Greece, and that Roman art is derivative. “A statue by a
Roman master compares with its Greek prototype as Virgil’s Dido
compares with Nausicaa of Homer on whom she is modelled.” 9
Here two questions arise and must be answered before we can
understand the depth and significance of Winckelmann’s work. Both
questions are simple. One is: what was it that made Winckelmann
search for specifically Greek art? The other is: what did he find in this
search? What are the central features of Greek art, as he saw it?
The first question, obvious and uncomplicated as it appears to be,
has received rather scant consideration from modern scholars. Yet what
Winckelmann did by shifting his attention from Rome to Greece was
not only unusual at the time; it was of great consequence in overturning
a historical construction that had been hallowed for centuries. Why did
he change the model of Antiquity? Were he simply a historian, intent
upon finding out the “true facts,” wishing to establish the correct
precedence of Greece over Rome, it would be easier to explain his
attempts. But Winckelmann was not in the first place a historian. As
we know, he came to writing history long after his gaze had been firmly
fixed on the model character of Greece. In his Thoughts on Imitation he
clearly described Greek art as the dominant, actually as the single,
model of perfection; here classical art does not even seem to have any
history. The History of Ancient Art, where he follows the development of
classical art, was written only years later. Winckelmann’s turning to
Greece cannot be satisfactorily explained by the historian’s interest
alone. His attempt, so fully vindicated by the scholarly work of subse-
quent generations, to replace the inherited Roman paradigm by a Greek
model of perfection raises interesting questions also with regard to his
personal motivations. His attitude to the Roman legacy was ambivalent.
On the one hand, he was fascinated by the tradition, he loved the city
of Rome because in it the great past was alive. On the other hand, his
life’s work amounted to a heroic endeavor to supersede the Roman by

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an “original” Greek culture and artistic tradition, and he never stopped

dreaming of visiting Athens, a dream that he never realized. Psycholo-
gists, one cannot help thinking, would find Winckelmann’s aborted
attempts to reach Athens an interesting case of internal conflict. The
exaltation of Greece is hard to understand without feeling an ambiguity
in his approach to Rome.
That Winckelmann was attracted to Rome, to the city and to the
culture, needs no explanation, that there was an ambiguity in this
relationship, however, does. There could have been many reasons for
this implied criticism of the Roman model and its influence on the art
and thought of Europe. Winckelmann’s work, as a modern scholar has
pointed out,'° betrays a certain outrage against the despotism of the
ancien régime. Now, both the regime and its despotism drew their
legitimation from a Roman imperial model. The rejection of modern
despotism may have affected also the sources of legitimation. Rome was
likewise intimately linked with the Christian tradition. It was the Roman
Catholic Church that dominated not only the Middle Ages but also the
kingdoms of the present. Much has been said against a too narrow
interpretation of what has been called Winckelmann’s “paganism,” '7
but one wonders whether his turning to a pre-Christian culture did
not, after all, imply a criticism of Rome. Winckelmann may also have
felt that there was a certain affinity between a mainstream in ancient
Roman, particularly imperial, art and the art of the Baroque. Was it not
possible, after all, that Bernini drew from deep roots in the artistic
tradition of his city? Nothing of this is explicitly stated in the writings,
but the attentive reader often cannot avoid feeling these, or similar,
thoughts lurking behind Winckelmann’s text.
Turning to Greece, one should not forget, was not an altogether
personal affair of Winckelmann’s. Interest in the Greek component of
classical culture began to stir in Winckelmann’s time, particularly in
France and in England. ‘““The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans,”
Diderot remarked to Catherine the Great, and, on another occasion, he
said that Thales was the first thinker who ‘introduced method into
philosophy, and [he] is the first to deserve the name of philosopher.” '*
Voltaire listed the original contributions of the Greeks: “Beautiful
architecture, perfect sculpture, painting, good music, true poetry, true

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eloquence, the method of writing good history, finally philosophy itself,

however incomplete and obscure—all these came to the nations from
the Greeks alone.”'!? There was also a beginning of interest in the
aesthetic aspects and artistic remains of Greek culture. In 1762 appeared
the first volume of the magnificent publication Antiquity of Athens, a
collection of drawings that brought views of the great Greek monu-
ments to the awareness of the learned in Europe.
Winckelmann’s conjuring up of Greek antiquity, one cannot help
feeling, has a certain affinity to the presentation of a utopian vision. It
goes without saying, I think, that our author was not aware that he was
distancing his vision—to a certain extent, at least —from actual reality;
surely he:did not intend anything like this. Yet in spite of his lack of
intention and awareness, his image of ancient Greece cannot be denied
a certain utopian quality.
The undercurrent leading to the displacement of the Greece he saw
in his mind from everyday, terrestrial reality can best be felt in his
descriptions of ancient works of art as “sacred.” Greek statues, the
reader of Winckelmann’s writings feels again and again, mysteriously
partake of the sanctity of their sacred sites, so much so that, in fact,
they carry some vestiges of that holiness into the museums where we
now see them. It is of course difficult to draw a sharp line of demarca-
tion between an outright metaphor and a statement whose literal
meaning may be called in question. Thus, when Winckelmann says that
Greek images of the “god and heroes are as if standing on sacred spots
where silence dwells,” how are we to understand this assertion? To
appreciate what Winckelmann says we probably have to consider, and
grant significance and weight to, that ill-defined area between meta-
phorical forms of expression and statements meant to be understood
literally.
The sacred, in a sense nonterrestrial, character of Greek statues is
strongly suggested by the recurring request for awe and silence in their
presence. The appropriate way of looking at a Greek figure is that of a
semisacred contemplation. Time and again, Winckelmann emphasizes,
as the German literary scholar Walter Rehm has clearly seen, the silence
and stillness surrounding the beautiful figures of an Apollo or an
Aphrodite. Silence, in general, becomes a condition of a supernatural

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beauty and perfection. Grace, the active form of beauty in human

experience, he says, works “only in the simplicity and silence of the
soul.”7°
Another ambiguity, more difficult to pin down but possibly more
important than other features, cannot be ignored. Winckelmann holds
up Greek antiquity as an ideal model for imitation. But how is the
modern artist supposed to imitate this ideal hovering in a slightly unreal
world and beyond his reach? Where should he start with his imitation?
Which particular features or aspects is he being asked to assimilate? The
careful reader notes something of a paradox. While Winckelmann
presents ancient Greek art as a model for imitation, he almost com-
pletely lacks any didactic approach. He does not try to give practical
assistance to the contemporary artist who would strive towards the
ideal vision of mythical Greece. In this respect, I believe, he departs
from the Renaissance legacy. Artists and teachers in the Renaissance
also had an image of a Golden Age which they made a model for
emulation. Yet to facilitate imitation, they analyzed their ideal model,
they tried to isolate “principles” or “‘parts.”” Winckelmann did nothing
of the kind. One cannot help wondering how he thought a modern
artist was supposed to emulate what he was being shown as an ideal.
Winckelmann’s Greece is a divine revelation rather than a didactic
model.

DLE CLEASSTGAIN:

In evoking Winckelmann’s work one cannot help also raising the

thorny, elusive, and yet unavoidable, problem of the classical. It is
Winckelmann, after all, who is generally considered as the principal
founder of classicism (or Neoclassicism, as some would like to call it) in
the modern world. In aesthetic reflection, there is probably no term
that has been so frequently and so indistinctly used as “the classical.”
As a result, the so-called classical has become a Protean notion, lacking
precise meaning. Surveying the literature, one sometimes wonders what
has not been considered, at one point or another, as being, or belonging
to, the essence of the classical. It is not for us here to attempt to cut a
path through this labyrinthine wilderness; we shall not offer still another

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description of “the classical.” But we shall try to look into some of the
major contexts in which the notion appears in Winckelmann’s thought.
Let us begin with a brief glance at a distant past. Ernst Robert
Curtius, the great scholar of literary traditions, has reminded modern
readers how the term classicism originated and that the term classicus
appeared for the first—and, in Antiquity, the only—time. It was a
Roman author of the second century A.D., Aulus Gellius, who used (or
coined) it (Noctes Atticae, XIX, 8,15). When in doubt as to how to use
an expression, he suggests, follow a model author: “Some of the orators
or poets, who at least belong to the older band, that is, a first class [id
est, classicus] and tax-paying author, not a proletarian.” Here “classical,”
though associated with tax paying, has the function of the model. The
idea lived on in one form or another, but the word did not achieve
wide currency and did not acquire its specifically modern terminological
meaning until fairly recent times.7! In the case of great historical or
cultural units, such as “the Greeks,” it has been applied only in the last
two centuries. Thus, partly as a result of Winckelmann’s work, around
1800 people began using the term “classical philology,” and, a little
later, “classical archaeology.”
In considering Winckelmann’s attitude to the classical, we should
begin by making a simple statement: so far as | can see, Winckelmann
never used the term “‘classical.”” Though he is deeply involved with the
idea of the classical, he did not coin, nor did he take over, a particular
term to designate this idea. It would be idle to speculate on the reasons
—and they may have been various—for this omission. Yet whatever
they were, it is certain that Winckelmann was sufficiently aware of the
complexity and multivalence of the phenomena grouped together in
what we call the classical that he could not file them under a single
heading. Instead of using such conceptual terms as the classical, Winck-
elmann, as a rule, employs concrete, historical words or phrases to
define what he means. Thus he speaks of “the Greeks,” or of “the
ancients.”” Even where he uses the more general formulation, he has
specific groups in mind: Athenian artists, or the Greeks. Often, in fact,
Winckelmann uses the idea of the classical in a modern sense: artists
belonging to different periods of history are grouped together in the
same category; the Greeks and Raphael are considered representative of

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the same type or model. Yet even in this case he does not designate
them by a common term. This characteristic feature of Winckelmann’s
terminology may tell us something about his views and ideas. He never
conceived of the classical as of an abstract category. What he considered
classical was always something that happened in history, in a specific
place and time, in fifth-century Athens or in sixteenth-century Rome.
It is part of a historical reality.
This is not the whole story however. While Winckelmann never
altogether detaches the classical from history, he endows it with quali-
ties and functions that are not completely drained off into history.
Though the phenomena called “classical” unavoidably occur at a given
place and time, they possess something that we should call, unasham-
edly, a timeless essence. The classical is not only a historical tradition,
it is also a superhistorical epiphany. Here, too, Winckelmann has no
special term. Nevertheless, he expresses himself clearly. He not only
tells the story of Greek art, he also wants to explain what it is that
makes Greek art so great. Before we can deal with the specific contents,
the concrete characterizations of classical art in Winckelmann’s work,
we must briefly survey the major contexts of the classical in his thought,
of the reasons for its being a model.
The classical, whatever else it may or may not be, has for Winckel-
mann the quality of the primeval, the aboriginal beginning. To be sure,
this beginning is not to be understood as the origin in a purely
chronological sense. Winckelmann knew, of course, that history did not
start in Greece. In his History of Ancient Art he naturally devoted the first
chapters to the art of Egypt and the ancient Near East, the great
historical divisions that preceded Greek culture in time. Nevertheless, it
is Greece, as follows from his text, that marks the real beginning of art.
Why, and in what sense, is this so? To put it as briefly as possible, our
author understands the notions of “beginning” or “origin” as the
primary casting of molds for artistic creation in general. Egyptians and
Phoenicians, Persians and Etrurians—this is how Winckelmann names
the cultures preceding the Greeks—are in a way considered as special
cases. Universality, at least in the sense of providing models for further
creation, begins with Greece. It was the Greeks who articulated the
central motifs and patterns in all major fields of thought and human

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creation. In doing so, they opened up the continuity of culture in which

we have been living ever since. Greek art had its significant part in the
process. As Greek mythology established an inexhaustible repertory of
themes and variations, so Greek art coined types that seem to be
inexhaustible in variety and “eternal” in duration. One of the crucial
features of the classical is its archetypal nature.
Encountering the aboriginal beginning in Greek art became for
Winckelmann also a personal experience, which he often forcefully
expressed. ‘“‘A few days ago,” he wrote once to a friend, “there came to
light a head of Pallas that in beauty surpasses everything that a human
eye can see, and that can come into a man’s heart and thought. |
remained stupefied as I saw this
Another contest of the classical, related to the archetypal yet in a
sense opposed to it, may most appropriately be termed “canonical.”
The notion and term of “canon” originated, as one knows, in the field
of law. From that origin it may have inherited, and still carry, certain
legal connotations. Yet the term is applied to many fields. For Winck-
elmann it has a particular significance.
A canon consists of a limited number of models presented for
imitation, application, or following. These “canonical” models, accord-
ing to the nature of the domain, may be sacred texts, ancient laws, or
almost any other articulation in a central domain of belief, behavior, or
creation. Yet however varied they may be with regard to their nature
and material, they have two basic characteristics in common: first, they
are specific, distinct, and self-enclosed units. It is
essential for the canon
that it not be a general idea, but a series of individual paradigms.
Second, the canonic models are considered as binding, their validity is
not disputed. Whether there is an intrinsic order among the paradigms,
thus forming a system, is a matter that need not detain us here.
A model for imitation is the cornerstone of tradition. Curtius has
described in detail how the traditions of medieval learning, medieval
law, and modern literature were obliged to form their respective canons
in order to persist as traditions.”
Winckelmann’s approach to Greek art conspicuously leans towards
the formation of a canon. He approaches this undertaking in two ways.
The first task Winckelmann set himself in Rome, so he tells us,7* was

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to describe the statues in the Belvedere. Not everything placed in that

cortile was to be covered. Our author specifies four statues that he
meant to include, and to reproduce, in his description: the famous
Apollo, the Laocoon, the so-called Antinows, and what is known as the
Torso Belvedere. He chose these pieces, he says, because they embody the
“utmost perfection of ancient sculpture.” The description, we further
learn, was to be arranged in two parts: the first “with regard to the
ideal, the other according to art.” Translated into modern terms, this
means that Winckelmann wished to treat the idea, or intention, behind
the statues, and how that idea was executed in hard stone. This task
however, ‘he writes, proved beyond his ability.”° Whatever the fate of
this intended project, it clearly manifests the intention of severely
selecting masterpieces so that they form a canon.
Another way to arrive at the articulation of a canon was to recount
the whole history of ancient art. The reader witnessing Winckelmann
unfolding the broad panorama of the history of ancient art sometimes
feels that he is participating in a great enterprise that to some extent
resembles the process of distillation: in the end he is left with a small
group—a cluster, one might almost say— of select works of art. These
works, in fact all statues, do not so much illustrate the different stages
of ancient art; they are rather models of perfection, meant to show
what it is that makes Greek art so great. It is, of course, not a matter
of chance that these exemplary works are so closely interrelated, and
that the list of works arrived at by surveying the history of Greek art
actually overlaps the list of works our author earlier called individual
models of perfection. Again we hear of the Laocoon and the Apollo from
Belvedere, as well as of the Lizard Killer and the Venus of the Medici
collection. The study of the history of Greek art, one might say, is a
canon-producing process.

3. IMITATION
The archetypal and the canonical are not self-enclosed. They involve
later developments and they presuppose an audience that has an artic-
ulate attitude towards the classical. Nothing is archetypal without the
existence of later stages that fully and in many variations express what

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was contained in the first (arche) formulation of the type, and without
later cultures that consider that early formulation as archetypal. The
same truth is even more obvious with regard to the canonical: without
a society accepting certain laws or models as perfect and binding, there
can be no canon. In the concepts of archetype and canon, past and
present meet and interrelate in intricate and often tortuous ways. This
relationship of the present to the past is manifested in many different
ways. With regard to art and artists, it is best revealed in what we call
imitation.
What “imitation” originally meant, at least in the Renaissance and
Baroque, is nowadays often obscured. The reason for this obfuscation is
that in our time the concept is frequently placed in a context that
differs radically from that in which it originally appeared. We often
hear of the “imitation of nature,” mainly in attempts to provide
foundations for realism. But in the centuries preceding Winckelmann,
the centuries from whose literature he drew, imitatio was primarily used
in a different context. For Renaissance and Baroque critics and men of
letters the term denoted the faithful following, the “imitation,” of
literary and artistic models.2° One does not have to go into a thorough
discussion of imitation in order to see the difference in character and
meaning of the notion that results from placing it in these two different
contexts. As a model, nature is less clearly articulate than a work of art;
it allows the artist, or forces him into, more choice and variation than,
say, does a statue. Imitating works of art, it goes without saying, is
more conducive to forming a tradition than is the imitation of nature.
This is also how Winckelmann understood “imitation,” ’ and how he
used the term.
On the title page of his first publication, we remember, Winckel-
mann uses this word. The careful reader notes, without being really
surprised, that never is nature, a real object, or a live figure presented
as a possible model for the artist’s imitation. What is proposed to him
are the works of art that form part of the canon. Moreover, for the
artist the imitation of canonic works of art is more fundamental than,
and precedes, the imitation of nature. The awareness of form acquired
in the imitation of works of art is a condition for detecting forms,
shapes, and features in nature. Without being instructed by the canonic

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works of art the artist would be blind to the shapes hidden in nature.
In Winckelmann’s dispute with the artists of the Baroque, he makes the
point that without the Greeks we could not perceive the beauty in
nature. It was in the statue of Venus, he says, that Bernini first
perceived those beauties that he later discovered in nature. Were it not
for that initial experience, Bernini “would not otherwise have sought
[those beauties] in the realm of nature.”’ This is so because “‘It is easier
to recognize the beauty of Greek statues than the beauty of nature.” s
The concept of imitation is essentially a cultural one, and it creates a
universe of culture.
Scanning Renaissance literature, one may get the impression that the
authors conceived of imitatio as of a simple, monolithic concept. Closer
reading, however, shows us that this is not the case. It will be useful
for us to distinguish, in an altogether summary fashion, three major
variations of the notion in the thought that the Renaissance bequeathed
to later times.
The first type of imitation is based on a ceremonial veneration of the
ancient model, of sacrosancta vetustas. This “sacramental imitation,’’ as
Thomas Greene has called it,”* by its very nature prevents the creation
of new and dynamic forms. In principle at least, no change of the model
is envisioned. Imitation is seen as a faithful and precise replication of
the original.
In the second variation of the notion, the heritage of the past — that
is, the models—is considered as a huge repository of forms and motifs,
a vast container from which the artist can freely chose whatever he
needs. The model chosen has only a limited influence on the imitator.
It is he who selects and combines from the legacy of the past.
A third variation of imitation, in itself rich in nuances, is one in
which the imitator is aware of the distance between himself and _his
model; he does not entertain the illusion that he can reproduce it with
precision, but he also knows that he cannot step out of this relationship
to the past, that he cannot treat his model as just “material,” to be
handled at will. His relationship to imitating is not an innocent one; it
is based on the awareness of the model’s otherness and specificity, but
also of its exemplary character. This kind of imitation combines the
model’s power to impose on the present an overall structure or direc-
 Modern Theories of Art

tion, and the imitator’s freedom to develop and create what was implied
in the model. In this dialectical view, imitation is both a following of
the past and a new creation.
This, in the broadest of outlines, was the framework that history
provided for Winckelmann’s thought on artistic imitation. What is his
own view? To him, only the third variation can be called imitation, and
it is only this kind that he has in mind when he speaks of imitating the
Greeks. He does not conceive of sacramental replication as an artistic
activity. “As against one’s own thought I put copying (Nachmachen), not
imitation. By the former I understand slavish following; in the latter,
what is imitated, if handled with reason, may assume an other nature,
as it were, and become one’s own.”?? Here one can clearly see the
difference between medieval and modern thought. In the spiritual world
of the Middle Ages, the more precise an imitation is the better it is. For
modern man, the creative act should manifest itself even in imitation. It
is therefore not surprising that the same Winckelmann who makes the
imitation of the Greeks the highest achievement possible to the present
world should also treat literal copying in derogatory terms.
Winckelmann does not speak at length about the second variety of
imitation, that which considers the past as a warehouse of ready-made
motifs and formulae. That he must have been opposed to such an
interpretation goes without saying. Time and again he stresses the idea
of the whole, of the comprehensive pattern in Greek art, considering
this an essential quality of its model character. “The notions of the
whole, of the perfect in the nature of Antiquity will purify and make
more sensual the notions of the divided in our nature.”*° In Winckel-
mann’s thought, wholeness and perfection are almost overlapping no-
tions. Emphasizing the wholeness of the Greek model is probably the
beginning of that trend of thought, so dominant in German classical
thought and literature, that rejects the fragmentary, even if it is fasci-
nating. Winckelmann is very far from the romantic’s concern for the
fragmentary and the incomplete.
What, then, is the object of imitation? What is the modern artist
asked to imitate if he follows Winckelmann’s advice and takes works of
Greek art as his models? The emphasis on wholeness imposes on the
modern student an observation concerning our author’s personal con-
ditions. Winckelmann spent most of his life looking at fragments,

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studying works of art that reached him in an incomplete, damaged

condition. Amidst all these broken pieces (parts of which populate our
museums) he cultivated in his mind the idea of an idealized, unharmed
perfection, a wholeness that belies the destruction caused by time. One
is tempted to sense here another utopian streak in Winckelmann’s
intellectual and psychological makeup. But how, one must ask, are we
to discern perfection and wholeness in works of art that have almost
invariably reached us as fragments?
In grasping the wholeness hidden in fragmentary pieces of sculpture,
there is little difference between the spectator who experiences a work
of Greek art and the artist who imitates it. The original whole, it goes
without saying, is not directly available to either of them, but it can be
recreated by both the spectator and the artist. But what specific
“object” are we to recreate? What Winckelmann thinks we should
recreate—both as spectators and as artists—is the original intention
of the artist who made the work. That intention can be divined even
from a small fragment. Here Winckelmann presents what is sometimes
called the ex pede Herculem theory: from the small fragment of a piece of
classical sculpture we can divine the whole figure, and, what is more,
the image that originally dwelt in the artist’s mind. To recapture that
elusive image is the aim of Winckelmann’s cognitive and artistic efforts.

4. BEAUTY
The exploration of Winckelmann’s thoughts about imitation brings us
to his notion of Perfect Beauty and the Ideal. The Ideal or Beauty is a
notion difficult to define, particularly as used by a writer like Winckel-
mann who was not a philosopher. He used the term frequently —both
as a noun and as the adjective “idealisch” —but nowhere did he define
it; as with other concepts in Winckelmann’s thought, one has to learn
its meaning from the context. It may therefore be best to describe the
Ideal by setting it off from what it is not. The Ideal, we know, is first
of all opposed to the natural, to the precise imitation of the shapes that
we encounter in everyday life. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that
Winckelmann tends to attenuate the Ideal into a mere intellectual
notion or idea, that he wants to transform it into a kind of image in the
mind. On the contrary, it is essential for the Ideal that it have a full

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material nature, that its presence is unrestrictedly felt, even though

under conditions that may seem scarcely attainable.
The philosophical status of the Ideal, or of Perfect Beauty, need not
worry us too much. Winckelmann himself was not overly concerned
with the theoretical status of the notion, and his writings will easily
yield contradictory statements on it. What is more important for our
purpose is what Ideal or Beauty actually mean in his work. It is the
material specifications that count here. We must therefore ask what he
saw with his mind’s eye when he spoke of absolute beauty and of the
ideal. What are the specific qualities he ascribed to this crucial notion?
In trying to answer this question we are on firmer ground than in an
effort to define notions of abstract methodology.
In attempting to describe the actual contents of the Ideal, or of
Perfect Beauty, Winckelmann is aware that he is aiming at something
that is perhaps beyond man’s reach. In the part of his History of Ancient
Art devoted to analyzing the reasons for the superiority of Greek over
the art of any other time and nation, he dwells on the difficulties of
describing beauty. “It is easier,” he declares, “to say what it is not than
what it is.”” And a few lines later, he admits: “Beauty is one of the great
mysteries of nature.” ?! Winckelmann’s understanding of Absolute Beauty
is in essence based on rejecting any specific qualities as proper descrip-
tions. What he says of the experience of ideal beauty is comparable to
some mystics’ account of their experience of God. As the mystic striving
to reach God by describing the divine attributes must finally conclude
that all qualifications only falsify the divine source, so Winckelmann
trying to describe the specific qualities of Ideal Beauty must eventually
conclude that this Beauty is ineffable and cannot be captured in distinct
categories. An essential attribute of lofty beauty, he tells his readers, is
the absence of individuality. What does this mean? Here is how Winck-
elmann himself puts it:

According to this idea, beauty should be like the best kind of water, drawn
from the spring itself; the less taste it has, the more healthful it is considered,
because free from all foreign admixture.°*

Only one quality can be attributed to Ideal Beauty. To designate it,

Winckelmann does not employ any technical term, and the word he

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does use never became a technical term. This quality is “unspecificity””

(Unbezeichnung). This is how he describes it:

From unity proceeds another attribute of lofty beauty, unspecificity; that is,
the forms of it are described neither by points nor by lines other than those
which shape beauty merely, and consequently produce a figure which is
neither peculiar to any particular individual, nor yet expresses any one state
of the mind or affection of the passions, because these blend with it strange
lines, and mar the unity.”

A dialectical, perhaps even a paradoxical, trend of thought dominates

Winckelmann’s work. He is a historian, but he is not content with
telling a story; time and again he attempts to describe what he himself
has recognized as being beyond description; he always strives to articu-
late what he himself has identified as ineffable. No wonder, then, that
the metaphor became the central medium of his language and his
thought. It has been noted that his metaphors, while describing the
works and essence of Greek art, are also intensely personal.
Winckelmann’s most famous description of the essence of Greek art
is “Noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur.” ** This endlessly quoted
epigram is clearly based on complex, tense metaphorical language. The
notion and images of stillness, quiet, and calm play a particularly
significant part in our author’s thought and style. The choice of these
expressions may also reflect some personal evidence. It was perhaps not
by chance and mere scholarly objectivity that a man like Winckelmann,
who could hardly control the stormy passions of his own life, discovered
“calmness” and “tranquillity” to be the central values of Greek art.°°
Did he project onto Greek art what he desired but could not attain for
himself? Or should we not rather come back to the comparison with
the mystic? When we contemplate a work of art, as follows from
Winckelmann’s writings, a kind of ecstatic stillness imposes itself on us.
One cannot help thinking of the mystic who, when he contemplates
the divine, ceases all activity and even dramatic feeling. Historians of
German literature have linked Winckelmann’s elevation of stillness with
the tradition of Pietism in Germany. The movement of Pietism goes
back to the late Middle Ages, to mystics like Tauler and Master
Eckhardt, but it was particularly strong in the eighteenth century.

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Winckelmann’s father came from Silesia, where Pietism was deeply

rooted. Pietism made quiet and stillness the scene of divine revelation.
One wonders whether Winckelmann’s “stillness” is not a secular ver-
sion, applied to art, of the pietist’s religious stillness.°°
The comparison of stillness with the sea is one of Winckelmann’s
most memorable literary figures. Throughout his work, the sea is
considered the symbol of stability and quiet; it evokes the memory of
extinct emotions and the sense of an anonymous silence. The sea’s
rough surface and stormy waves (images that play such a crucial role in
the history of European literature and symbolism) are to him insignif-
cant accessories, not revealing the true nature of the element. “As the
depths of the sea remain always at rest, however the surface may be
agitated, so the expression in the figures of the Greeks reveals in the
midst of passion a great and steadfast soul,” he said in his first compo-
sition.?’ The monumental calm and stability that are the “contents” of
what the sea tells us are also a condition for our perceiving what is
involved in a work of art. Speaking of looking at the masterpieces of
Greek art, he says:

A state of stillness and repose ... is that state which allows us to examine
and discover their real nature and characteristics, just as one sees the bottom
of a river or lake only when their waters are still and unruffled, and conse-
quently even art can express her own peculiar nature only in stillness.°8

Whatever the origins of Winckelmann’s notion of “stillness,” we

must ask what this concept, as presented in his writings, means for the
interpretation of art. The best way to answer the question is to say
what “‘stillness” is not. These negations, it should be pointed out, are
not purely notional. Seen against the historical conditions in which they
were put forward, they acquire a material meaning. This in turn should
not lead us to assume that Winckelmann’s conceptual formulations are
no more than a criticism of individual artistic trends.
In a discussion of the theory of art it is important to notice that
Winckelmann juxtaposes “stillness” against dramatic expression. Pre-
cisely in this he marks the break with a great tradition. Ever since the
early Quattrocento and up to the late Baroque, from Leone Battista
Alberti to Bernini, the high regard for dramatic expression, for the
convincing manifestation of the passions, was the central category of art

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criticism. Art theory made the expression of emotions the highest aim
of art, particularly in the noblest art form, the istoria. To be sure,
throughout these centuries writers on art also asked painters and
sculptors to be moderate in the expression of emotions. But this
exigence was subordinated to the desire for clarity of expression; there
was never any doubt that the expressing of emotions was the central
value of a great work of art. Winckelmann, so far as I know, is the first
thinker on art who explicitly rejects that demand for expressing passion
in art along with the scale of values historically implied in it.
The end of art, Winckelmann claims, is beauty, “the loftiest mark
and the central point of art.” *’ Not the representation of reality, nor
the giving of pleasure, nor the expression of emotions, as the main
trends of thought had had it. Beauty is an autonomous value, its cause
cannot be found outside itself.*° That value contradicts expression.
Beauty, Winckelmann says in the History of Ancient Art, requires “no
expression of the passions of the soul.” Moreover, “Expression ...
changes the features of the face, and the posture, and consequently
alters those forms which constitute beauty.” ”" The beautiful, it follows,
is expressionless; a beauty devoid of emotional expression is the ideal.
Greek art, in its highest perfection, is indeed without expression,
with some exaggeration, you might say that it is drained of emotions.
This can best be seen in the most dignified works of classical art. Greek
statues of the gods, we read, “show no trace of emotion,” they are
“tranquil and passionless.” *”
Winckelmann holds up this paradigm of expressionless beauty against
the art of his time. The great antipode of beauty is Bernini precisely
because of his unrestrained desire to express emotions and his marvel-
ous skill in doing so. Bernini is not isolated, the art of his time follows
him, and even the academies of art accept his scale of values.

This exaggerated style of expression is even inculcated by Charles Le Brun,

in his Treatise on the Passions, —a work in the hands of most young students of
art. In his illustrative drawings, the passions are not only represented, in the
face, in an extreme degree, but in several instances the expression of them
amounts even to frenzy.*°

Ideal beauty, one should remember, is also free from personal incli-
nation. “Those wise artists, the ancients, ... purified their images from

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all personal feelings, by which the mind is diverted from the truly
beautiful,” Winckelmann declares in his History of Ancient Art.** Our
author does not so much stress the abstention from personal feelings as
the expressionless character of ideal beauty. It is not difficult, however,
to see that the two hang together. They express the same ideal.

§. THE NATURE OF THE IDEAL

What was this ideal? Modern textbooks are likely to tell us that it is the
art of Antiquity, or, more specifically, the art of Greece. Yet these
historical labels obviously do not provide sufficient answers, for a great
variety of imports and intentions may be subsumed under them. What
is it that Antiquity or Greece stand for? What remains after we have
cast off the historical terms? It would be presumptuous for us to
attempt here a formulation of Winckelmann’s ideal in modern language.
The Greek ideal that he held up as a redeeming image for imitation has
many components. Summarizing the discussion of Winckelmann as a
theorist of art, I should like to comment briefly on some ideas that are
crucial in his intellectual world.
Nowadays Winckelmann is often seen as the forerunner, or even the
founder, of a refined aestheticism, that is, of a movement that tries to
isolate the beautiful from all contexts and to make it fully autonomous.
Such a classification of Winckelmann, however, is completely mistaken.
Beauty and art, he believed, follow from moral reasons; the very nature
of great art is profoundly moral. In the spirit of the age he admired, he
never detached the beautiful from the good. The term he most fre-
quently used to describe beauty and great art, and even to designate
specific components of the work of art—such as contour—is “noble.”
“The noblest contour unites and circumscribes all the parts of the most
beautiful nature and of the ideal beauties,” ’ we read already in the
Thoughts on Imitation.** But “noble,” we should keep in mind, is a term
taken from the domain of morals. “Nobility” belongs to the soul,
though it shines forth in bodies. From Plato, Winckelmann learns that
the gymnasium of Athens forms the background, and gives us an idea,
“of the noble souls of Greek youth.” It was in the gymnasium, we
remember Winckelmann saying, that were cultivated those beautiful

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bodies that became the paradigm of ideal beauty and that were a major
reason for making Greek art the climax of all ages. Morality becomes
manifest in the gymnasium. “Their generous human nature prevented
the Greeks from introducing brutal spectacles,” which were common
in the pre-Greek period. This intimate connection of morality and
formal beauty makes it easy for Winckelmann to say that Raphael
endowed his figures with a “noble contour and a lofty soul,” and to
claim that the Laocoon manifests “bodily anguish and moral greatness. 46
Another feature that shapes the overall character of Winckelmann’s
thought is his craving for wholeness, particularly for a harmonious
relationship between the individual and his society. Nowhere does he
clearly state this yearning, or explain what precisely it is that he yearns
for, but we can detect it in his historical imagination and in what he
projects as ideals presented for veneration and imitation. His image of
ancient Greece is a remedial projection of utopian wish fulfillment. The
pervasive longing for wholeness in an absent reality is an index to a
prevailing sense of fragmentation in the present. “The concepts of the
wholeness, of the perfection in the nature of Antiquity will clarify and
make more tangible the concepts of the division in our nature.”*’ “Our
time,” then, is the age of division and fragmentation.
Students of Winckelmann have noted that much of his half-utopian
thought derives from motives related to the historical conditions pre-
vailing in his time, and thus implies a far-reaching social criticism. What
he perceives as lacking in his own world, he depicts as present in
ancient Greece. Thus, when he claims that in Greece “the thoughts of
the whole people rose higher with freedom”*® and made possible the
blooming of art, he implicitly points to the reason for the decline of the
arts in “‘our time.”
In Winckelmann’s Greece, it should be emphasized, art is a thor-
oughly communal affair. All art was devoted to the gods only, and it
was displayed solely in public places. The private homes of the citizens
were characterized by “restraint and simplicity”; in them there was no
room for art. This state of affairs had a direct impact on the artistic
style. The ancient Greek artist was not cramped by the need “‘to suit
the size of the dwelling or gratify the fancy of its proprietor.” *° The
implied reference to the crippling effect of “modern” conditions on art

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is here obvious. We also perceive an implied criticism of modern

patronage in Winckelmann’s description of how works of art were
judged in Greece.

The reputation and success of artists were not dependent upon the caprice
of ignorance and arrogance, nor were their works fashioned to suit the
wretched taste or the incompetent eye of a judge set up by flattery and
fawning; but the wisest of the whole nation, in the assembly of united Greece,
. 7 SO
passed judgment upon, and rewarded, them and their works.

This harmonious relationship between the artist and his community

is the remedy against the fragmentary nature of the art of the modern
world.
A third feature in Winckelmann’s thought, the final one we should
like to mention here, is perhaps the most important in the present
context; it is his concept of form in great, mainly Greek, art. Ideal art,
Winckelmann believed, as we have already seen, produced restricted—
one could say, ascetic—forms. By their very nature, these forms are
spiritual. They have a minimum of material substance and effects. It is
instructive to follow what Winckelmann has to say in juxtaposing the
beauties of nature and of art. The beauties of art excite us less than the
beauties of nature, and they will therefore “be less pleasing to the
uninstructed mind than ordinary pretty face which is lively and ani-
mated.” Why is this so? The answer implies much of Winckelmann’s
philosophy of art.
The cause lies in our passions,which with most men are excited by the first
look, and the senses are already gratified, when reason, unsatisfied, is seeking
to discover and enjoy the charm of true beauty. It is not, then, beauty which
captivates us, but sensuality. *!

Such a statement marks a radical departure from a venerable tradi-

tion. For centuries, art theory had educated readers to see a central
value of art in the picture’s power to arouse the passions. The claim
that in arousing the passions the work of a great artist falls behind any
merely pretty face is therefore surprising. Winckelmann makes this
statement, one need hardly emphasize, not in order to denigrate the
value of art, but to show that art is of a spiritual rather than of a sensual
nature.

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Because the nature of art differs from that of material reality,

Winckelmann does not consider the convincing imitation of the latter
an achievement of the former. The discriminating reader of Winckel-
mann’s writings will notice that our author does not extol illusion as a
summit of art, and that he does not tell the stories, endlessly repeated
in the art literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of birds
being misled by painted grapes and mares neighing at painted horses. A
work of art, he believes, is a piece of nature and of tangible matter
absorbed, as it were, into a spiritual form. The more radical the
absorption, the purer and more spiritual the form, the greater the art.
This attitude also emerges in his appreciation of the specific means
of artistic production. Thus color, for centuries considered the embod-
iment of sensual experience, “should have but little share in our
consideration of beauty.” Beauty, he explains, “consists, not in color,
but in shape. .. .”>? Within the domain of line—or of “shape,” as he
here puts it—itself, it is the restricted that has the higher value. The
idea of beauty “‘is like an essence extracted from matter by fire.” When
beauty is embodied in an image of a human figure—the great theme of
Greek art—‘“the forms of such a figure are simple and flowing.” All
beauty, he goes on to say, “is heightened by unity and simplicity.”
Summing up his views on the simplicity of beauty and form, he uses a
musical comparison. “The harmony which ravishes the soul does not
consist in arpeggios, and tired and slurred notes, but in simple, long-
drawn tones.” ©?
A present-day student, trying to translate Winckelmann’s text and
images into a modern conceptional idiom, cannot help thinking of
“abstraction.” Needless to say, “abstraction” here should not be taken
in its terminological precision. The specific images and ideas our author
had in mind are not precisely the same as those that have occupied the
minds of twentieth-century artists and writers. But his longing for
restraint, simplicity, and purity necessarily leads to what we would
today call an abstract form. The gospel of abstraction that Winckelmann
preached to his contemporaries was perhaps the most important legacy
he bequeathed to art theory of the modern age.

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Ui hea)BYWB StOoh

1. ART THEORY AND ART CRITICISM

The upheaval that shook reflection on painting and sculpture in the

middle of the eighteenth century had many consequences. One was the
final splintering of the art-theoretical treatise. The traditional shape for
presenting thought on art had been the systematic treatise. Established
in the early stages of the Renaissance, this literary form flourished for
centuries. The treatise commonly combined an analytical description of
the “parts” (or other categories) of painting (more rarely also of
sculpture), with prescriptions, usually couched in general terms, for
what was considered good art, and proposals for what the artist should
represent and how he should proceed. The comprehensive treatise,
though often threatened by other forms of presentation, survived
throughout the seventeenth century. Late in that period it was still
magnificently represented by Gerard de Lairesse’s Le grand livre de
peintres, which we considered in the previous chapter.”* In the eigh-
teenth century, this type of presentation rapidly dwindled in signifi-
cance, and after the middle of the century it practically disappeared as
a central literary form for the instruction of artists or the interpretation
of art for a broad public. A variety of literary forms were now taking
the place of the systematic treatise, among them the history of a period
(such as Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art), individual lectures, and
so on. These forms also included art criticism.
What art criticism is and how it can be distinguished from other
approaches to art is a matter that has not gone unnoticed in modern
scholarly literature,”” though certainly much remains to be done. We
shall not here undertake a definition of art criticism or an outline of its
problems. I shall simply presume that everyone knows what art criti-
cism is. In the following observations, | shall be concerned with only
one aspect of the subject: in what way the emerging art criticism was
able to make a substantial contribution to art theory.
Before we attempt a survey of the relationship between the two
fields in the middle of the eighteenth century, particularly in the work

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of Diderot, it may be helpful to note briefly two areas in which art

criticism and art theory radically differ from each other. The first point
is the concern with, or the attitude to, the individual work of art. To
many modern readers, it may seem surprising, but it can hardly be
doubted, that traditional art theory, geared as it was to influence artists
in their work, had little use for the individual painting or statue. To be
sure, individual works of art are often mentioned in the treatises,
sometimes even discussed at length; yet the primary context of the
discussion is invariably provided by some broader problem, a theoretical
theme such as a particular “part” of painting. The conceptual, often
altogether abstract, character of the themes so presented is common in
art theory and prevails whether the author of the treatise is a literary
scholar or a practicing artist. To take a striking example, Leonardo’s
observations obviously attest to a unique familiarity with the making of
a work of art; they carry the flavor of his personal imagination. Yet he
does not discuss at any length the specific paintings he has actually seen
(as opposed to his visions of pictures not yet painted). The themes he
treats, such as color, light, movement, anatomy, expression, or perspec-
tive, are of a general, conceptual nature.°° When traditional art theory
speaks of an individual painting or sculpture, the work is treated as an
illustration of a general idea rather than as a full, autonomous subject
of a discussion. This is true even in the rare cases when a whole treatise
is devoted to a single work of art. When in the sixteenth century
Francesco Bocchi takes Donatello’s St. George as a point of departure,
he treats it as an example of depicting character and emotion in
sculpture. *” The same is true for Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s treatment of
Raphael’s paintings in the Loggia.*® The seventeenth-century scholar
and president of the Roman Academy of Art sees in these paint-
ings a model for the painter’s treatment of subject matter and applica-
tion of ideal forms. Throughout that tradition, it can thus be said, the
individual work of art remains an illustration of general principles
rather than the unique product of an individual artist’s imagination and
skill.
Art criticism, on the other hand, is essentially oriented towards the
individual work of art. That it is not completely detached from general

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ideas need hardly be stressed. Even without going into the philosophical
problem of the individual—a thorny problem indeed, and one that has
occupied the minds of thinkers for centuries —we intuitively grasp that
one cannot approach an individual work of art without drawing on
broad categories that go far beyond the unique piece that is presented.
Once the beholder reacts to what he sees by saying more than just “I
like” or “I don’t like,” he is indulging in some kind of art theory.
Whenever he tries to explain what makes him praise or reject a work
of art, he engages in art theory. It may be crude and primitive, but
theory it is. It is essential to note, however, that in actual art criticism,
as we know it, the general, theoretical concepts and categories usually
remain implicit, or are only lightly, marginally referred to; they never
become the primary subject of the art critic’s discussion.
The total dependence of art criticism on the individual work of art
has produced some striking historical and literary expressions. It is
interesting to notice that art criticism was actually the twin sister of the
art exhibition, itself equally based on the concept of the individual work
of art. Art theory, one is not surprised to find, did not have the
intellectual means of dealing with the art exhibition. It simply did not
record the “Salon.” Were we to confine ourselves to the purely art
theoretical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we
would suppose that the art exhibition had never come into being.
In literary form, art criticism is also determined by the individual
work of art or an assembled group of such works. Inherent in the
literary form, therefore, is a certain fragmentary character. As opposed
to the systematic treatise, the presentation of criticism is, like Pascal’s
great work, ‘“‘achevé par son inachévement.” It does not have a struc-
ture of its own or have its own problems. It is the individual work of
art, present here and now, that gives art criticism its direction, raises
its problems, and determines its structure.
A similar situation obtains with regard to the second area in which
art theory and art criticism seem to differ radically. This concerns what
is considered the most typical feature of the whole critical activity—
the appraisal and evaluation of the work of art. What the audience
expects of the art critic is, first of all, the passing of judgment. Crudely

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put, art criticism is generally understood as the discrimination of the

good from the poor.
The passing of judgment is not alien to traditional art theory. From
Alberti and Lomazzo to Dubos and Gerard de Lairesse, writers and
teachers of art theory passed judgments on works of art, evaluated
paintings and statues, painters and sculptors. In the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the thought prev-
alent in the art academies, the judging of artists—and, to a lesser
extent, of individual works of art—became so institutionalized that the
judgments themselves could be cast in numerical patterns. The artists
of the past got marks, the ultimate achievement of judging. On a scale
of 20, Le Brun (who, incidentally, obtained the highest score) got a 16
in line, in composition, and in expression, but a mere 8 in color; Diirer
got only to in line as well as in color, but even less, an 8, in both
composition and expression.”
Should we therefore conclude that, at least with regard to passing
judgment, there is no difference between art theory and art criticism?
On the contrary, here the difference between them becomes even more
strikingly manifest. First we should remember that in art theory judg-
ment was again a means of illustration. It is therefore not surprising
that in classical art theory the object judged is a master’s style rather
than one of his individual works. Moreover, components and aspects
are appraised, such as line, color, composition, expression, and so on.
In singling out one aspect, one particular element, the organic unity is
torn apart, in a profound sense it is transformed into an abstraction.
From this point of view, and overstating the case, we could claim that
the object judged by art theory is a “nonobject.”
For art criticism, the passing of judgment does not serve, at least not
directly and manifestly, any additional, “higher” purpose. The work
singled out as either good or bad is not meant to lead us further than
the lively encounter between the spectator and the work in front of
him. The work of art is not analytically torn apart, no aspect or element
is separated from the intricate web that constitutes the unique work of
art. The work is experienced in its totality, though that totality may
sometimes seem to be an irrational one.

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Now let us come back to the starting point of these sketchy com-
ments, and ask: how can art criticism make a significant contribution to
the theory of art? Diderot’s work as a critic may yield an answer. In
trying to understand what he says about painting, let me repeat, I shall
consider only what may be pertinent to art theory.

2. DIDEROT: SPONTANEITY AND MORALITY

One need hardly stress that Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was much more
than a critic. Few figures in eighteenth-century thought were as many-
sided as Diderot, and few, one should add, so clearly announce the
coming of the modern age as he did. “A striking and appealing figure,
learned, talkative, energetic, changeable, inventive, sensual, and elusive,
Diderot embodies the dualism of the Enlightenment to perfection: a
partisan of empiricism and scientific method, a sceptic, a tireless exper-
imentor and innovator, Diderot was possessed by the restlessness of
modern man’?—this is how one modern historian has described him.°°
His many activities included art criticism. Diderot’s concern with art
and the philosophical problems it poses began early. Mainly in his Lettre
sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind) (1749), but even in earlier writings, we
already find ideas that form the beginning of a concept of art. From
1759 he contributed notes on the biennial Salon to the collections of his
friend, the German-Parisian man of letters Friedrich Grimm. In 1765 he
attached to these notes a short Essay on Painting (Essai sur la peinture). His
exhibition reviews (the “Salons,” as they are now commonly called) can
unhesitatingly be claimed to constitute the beginning of art criticism as
a literary genre. They naturally tell us much about the views on art that
were held, at least in certain circles, in the 1750s and 1760s. These
writings, together with some of the material contained in the Encyclopé-
die (of which Diderot was a principal editor), make it possible for us to
picture his thought on our subject and to speak of his contribution to
art theory.
It is characteristic of Diderot that he does not present his ideas in
systematic fashion. For us, however, it may be useful to proceed from
the general to the specific, stressing the unity in his thought, although
it may be hidden rather than openly demonstrated. In his treatment of

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the broadest problem, beauty, one already senses where the main
emphasis is placed. The article on Beauty (Beau), originally written for
the Encyclopédie but published separately in Amsterdam in 1772, displays
Diderot’s leanings. He distinguishes between different kinds of beauty:
absolute, real, and perceived. While he does not deny the existence of
Absolute Beauty, his major concern is with perceived Beauty, for he
cannot conceive even the metaphysical problem of Beauty except in
relation to the person experiencing ite
Diderot’s contribution to the theory of art (the term now taken in a
more precise sense) does not consist in any definite body of teachings,
in a “doctrine.” As I have said, he was too impulsive and passionate a
thinker to present a balanced, consistent doctrine. His major contribu-
tion lies in raising certain problems and articulating certain attitudes.
Some of these problems are still very much with us. Through raising
them, and making them a central matter of art discussion, Diderot
becomes a real founder of the modern age.
The artist’s spontaneity was a persistent and central concern of
Diderot’s thought. Spontaneity showed him many faces. One of them is
the sketch. Diderot is among the earliest critics, not themselves artists,
to appreciate and love the sketch and to praise it as an art form in its
own right. Why is he so attracted to the sketch? Precisely because the
sketch shows the painter’s spontaneity in a pure form. Thus he explains
in the Salon of 1765:

A sketch is generally more spirited than a picture. It is the artist’s work

when he is full of inspiration and ardor, when reflection has toned down
nothing, it is the artist’s soul expressing itself freely on the canvas. His pen
and skillful pencil seems to sport and play; a few strokes express the rapid
fancy, and the more vaguely art embodies itself the more room is there for
the play of the imagination. 62

This is certainly a surprising attitude, and a statement that might

well have been made in the twentieth century.
Another value of the sketch is that it allows the spectator to partici-
pate, as it were, in the shaping of what he sees in the picture. Speaking
of the difference between a sketch and a finished painting, Diderot says:
“in the latter the subject is fully worked out for us to look at; in the

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former I can imagine so many things which are only suggested.” °? The
desire to activate the beholder is another modern element, and it points
in the same direction that can be sensed in Diderot’s early article on
The Beautiful, which had stressed the perceiver’s role.
The Academy of Art constricts the artist’s freedom and spontaneity.
While the young artist is acquiring traditional forms and motifs, “the
truth of nature is forgotten; the imagination is crammed with actions,
positions, and forms that are false, prepared, ridiculous, and cold.” Even
if the conventional forms constituting tradition are not directly forced
upon the artist, it will be difficult for him to get rid of them. “They are
in stock there, and will come forth to get fixed on the canvas. Every
time the artist takes up pencils or brush, these dull ghosts will awake
and appear before him. . . Rida
The Academy is a representative of society in general. Patronage, so
Diderot seems to view it, is always a constraint on the artist’s freedom:
society imposes limitations on him and imperils his very creativity. “For
Diderot the artist’s inner freedom is the impulsive, unaccountable flow
of the pencil and brush, of images and ideas; verve, enthusiasm, spon-
taneity and naturalness are its outward signs. Without that flow there
is no authentic art.”°° Meyer Schapiro has pointed out that in these
views Diderot may have been influenced by Longinus, the literary critic
of the third century A.D., who lived under Roman imperial rule and
who also praised enthusiasm and imagination as the very origins of art.
Longinus denounced the debasement of art in his own time and society,
and saw the reason for this in the love of money, luxury, and pleasure.°°
In the eighteenth century, Longinus was popular among writers and
intellectuals, and Diderot may well have drawn from him. However
that may be, in the modern age Diderot is among the first critics to
forcefully juxtapose the artist and society, and to consider society as
oppressive and restrictive.
Oppressive tradition and constraining society do not remain merely
in the general background of the artist’s life and personality. They are
represented within the process of artistic creation itself. It is the “rules”
and, to a lesser extent, “the model” that embody these constricting
powers. This view of artistic rules may explain Diderot’s passionate
denial of them. The student will remember that the debate on the

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nature and status of rules in art has a long history. In the late sixteenth
century, Giordano Bruno’s attack on rules in art marks the end of a
great period, and indicates a profound crisis in the life and art of the
time.°’ A century later, the very foundations of the Academy of Art
were shaken by Roger de Piles’s questioning of the régles assurées. 68 In all
these historical movements rejecting a dominant style and establish-
ment, “rule” was juxtaposed against genius. In his late Pensées detachées
sur la peinture, Diderot follows this example: ‘““The rules have made of
art a routine, and | do not know whether they have been more harmful
than useful. Let us put it squarely: the rules have helped the ordinary
man, they have injured the man of genius.” °° And somewhere else he
tells of the young artist who, “before touching the least stroke to his
canvas, would fall on his knees and and say, ‘Lord, deliver me from the
model.’ ” 7°
Criticism, too, can become a representative of the “‘rules,” sometimes
trying to derive its authority from genius itself.

I beg Aristotle’s pardon, but it is a vicious sort of criticism to deduce

exclusive rules from the most perfect works, as if the means of pleasing were
not infinite. Genius can infringe almost any of these laws with success. It is
true that the troupe of slaves, while admiring, cry sacrilege.’!

Just as the tyranny of rules has a hardening effect on the artist’s

spontaneous imagination, so also does it dull the spectator’s experience.
The critic who rigorously applies aesthetic rules interposes himself
between the work of art and the amateur looking at it. ‘““What a stupid
occupation it is to try ceaselessly to keep us from feeling pleasure, or to
make us blush because of the pleasure we have taken in something—
that is the occupation of the critic.”
These statements, with all their rebellious tone and surprisingly
modern ring, should not mislead us, however: Diderot was not a
romantic, nor did he have any consistent world view that would make
of him a full-fledged citizen of our own day. I would like to illustrate
the other side of Diderot, his links with traditional classicism, by a brief
discussion of his views on artistic imagination and on the moral function
of the work of art.
We have become used to viewing the artist’s imagination as the

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creative agent, and it is thus interesting to observe what imagination

means to Diderot. He understands it mainly as the faculty of recalling
images or the appearances of objects. It presupposes memory, and has a
special affinity with visual experience. Already in his early Letter on the
Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, he says that imagination presents to the
mind pictures and streams of pictures. But these pictures are not
created out of nothing. They are a distillation of previous impressions.
This is true even for the most famous works of art. In his Essay on
Painting, attached to the Salon of 1765, we read:

Michelangelo gave the most perfect form possible to the dome of St.
Peter’s. ... What was it that inspired this curve rather than an infinity of
others that he might have chosen? Day-to-day experience of lifetisexal?

In general, so we learn from his notes on the Salon of 1767, the artist
creates nothing (if that word is taken in a precise sense); he only
imitates, composes, combines, exaggerates, enlarges upon, and dimin-
ishes various parts of nature. Here, one almost believes oneself to be
listening to St. Augustine claiming that the “creature cannot create,” or
to Thomas Aquinas stressing that all the artist can do is change a shape,
but not invent or create anything.”
The artist’s expression of emotions is also based on his ability to
recall what he saw; it does not involve his own emotions. Listen to
what Diderot says in his late composition, the Paradox on Acting, written
between 1773 and 1778, on David Garrick:

What I am going to tell you now is something I witnessed myself.

Garrick put his head through the gap between two leaves of a door, and in
the space of four or five seconds his faced passed successively from wild joy
to moderate joy, from joy to composure, from composure to surprise, from
surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to sadness, from sadness to
gloom, from gloom to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to despair,
and then back again from this final stage up to the one from which he started.
Was his soul capable of feeling all those sensations and of collaborating with
his face in the playing of that scale, as it were? I don’t believe it for a moment,
and neither do you.”°

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It was only in the nineteenth century that the theory of the sincere
artist, reviving the old Horatian view in a modern version, became
popular.
Even more surprising is what Diderot has to say about the morality
of art. He likes Greuze, so he writes in his Salon of 1763, because his
work “is a painting with a moral.””° “To make virtue desirable, vice
odious, and absurdities evident, that is the aim of every honest man
who takes up the pen, the brush, or the chisel,” he writes two years
later in his Essay on Painting.’’ And, one page earlier, he had said that
“there is one thing that painting and poetry have in common: they
should both be moral.”
Morality, intimately connected with expression, becomes a yardstick
for judging the value of pictures and styles. Explaining what composi-
tion is, he writes:

Composition is ordinarily divided into the picturesque and the expressive.

For my part, I care not a jot how well the artist has disposed his figures in
order to achieve striking light effects if the work as a whole does not speak to
my heart, if the characters in the painting are simply standing about like
people ignoring one another in a public park or like animals at the foot of a
landscape painter’s mountains. ”

Is this the same author who praises Chardin’s still lifes for their
power to reveal the beauties and mysteries of visual experience in the
insignificant objects he represents? Speaking of a small Chardin still life,
Diderot says, “If |wanted my child to be a painter, this is the painting
I should buy. ‘Copy this,’ I should say to the child, ‘Copy it again.’ pra
And in the Salon of 1765, in front of another picture representing a
subject of no consequence, Diderot exclaims: “Oh, Chardin, you are
just in time to restore the use of my eyes to me after the mortal injuries
inflicted on them by your colleague Challe.”8°
Yet it is the same Diderot—in fact, in the very same review — who
passionately criticizes Boucher for his immoral, indecent pictures. The
immorality of the paintings diminishes their aesthetic value. Boucher,
he believes, has no idea of the morality of art. “I would not scruple to
say to Boucher,” Diderot writes in the Essay on Painting, “If your work

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is never intended for anyone but smutty-minded eighteen-year-olds,

then you are quite right, my friend; go on painting your breasts and
bottoms. .. .”°! This heavy emphasis on morality —naturally a morality
of subject matter—misleads Diderot in his judgments. With the advan-
tage of hindsight, we can now see that thanks to this moralistic
dogmatism he rejected artists who have withstood the test of time,
among them Boucher and Watteau, and embraced others whose names
have been totally forgotten. But his emphasis on the morality of the
work of art also endows the artist with an aura that goes far beyond
that of providing aesthetic pleasure. The artist becomes the mouthpiece
for humanity. “On the door of the painter’s studio,” so we read in the
Essay on Painting, “there should be an inscription: ‘Here the wretched
find eyes that weep for them.’ Cee
Can the two sides of Diderot be reconciled? I doubt it. One cannot
make of him a consistent, systematic thinker whose doctrine is free
from contradictions. But in his unsystematic, yet passionate, way he
articulated problems that impressed themselves profoundly on the mod-
ern age.

IV. REYNOLDS

The generation that laid the foundations for the new age in theoretical
reflection on the visual arts came to an end with an artist who in many
respects differed from the archaeologists, historians, and philosphers we
have discussed so far. This is Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), perhaps
the most important figure in the history of British painting, the first
president of the newly established Royal Academy in London. He was
celebrated in his time, the first of the “learned artists” in England. His
patrons included the English court, the aristocracy, and men such as
Samuel Johnson and David Garrick. Indeed, since Bernini’s death no
artist had occupied a position of similar social esteem and fame.
Reynolds pronounced his views on art in the course of the presiden-
tial addresses he gave to the Academy at the prize-awarding celebrations
held every second year. The first and second discourses, were delivered
in 1769, only a few months after Winckelmann’s death and while

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Diderot’s Salons were still being published; he gave his last in 1790, at
the very beginning of the age of Romanticism.
As the president of the Royal Academy of Art, Reynolds—rather
like Anton Raphael Mengs—held a traditional view of painting, and
advocated an art of a kind that we now call “academic.” It was his
expressed intention to cling to tradition, and to transmit its contents to
the younger generation. “It is the principal advantage of an Academy,”
he said in his opening address, “that, besides furnishing able men to
direct the student, it will be a repository for the great examples of the
Art.”®? What he mainly had in mind was “obedience” to what the
great examples can teach us.

I would chiefly recommend, that an implicit obedience to the Rules of Art,

as established by the practice of the great masters, should be extracted from
the young students. That those models, which have passed through the appro-
bation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect and infallible guides;
as subjects for their imitation, not their criticism.**

In his explanations of art and of the artist’s job, Reynolds, then, did
not want to offer novel departures; his aim was to secure for the future
the accepted and proven models. Nevertheless, one finds in his doctrine
much that does not directly ensue from the ideas and patterns he so
ardently wished to follow. It is new emphases, rather than new ideas,
that sometimes make of Reynolds a borderline figure, one who—
possibly against his own will—announced the coming of a new age. In
approaching his Discourses, it would be wrong to expect a philosopher’s
consistency and discipline of thought. The views sometimes vary, the
formulations are not always fully clear. The reader familiar with Italian
art literature both of the Renaissance and the Baroque, and with
seventeenth-century French doctrines, will find common views and
common themes on every page of the Discourses. Yet through these very
weaknesses, Reynolds’s addresses become a faithful mirror of what was
going on, subterraneously, as it were, in intellectual attitudes to art in
the last third of the eighteenth century. It is this property that makes
the Discourses a document so precious to the historian of art and ideas.
In the following pages, | shall concentrate mainly on the ideas in the
Discourses that suggest the rising significance of new themes. Reynolds

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himself would probably not have agreed that he was departing from
tradition. The modern reader, however, with the advantage of hind-
sight, is in a good position to discriminate between what Reynolds
merely repeated and what he actually transformed.
At the center of Reynolds’s thought one finds, as can be expected,
the idea of imitation. Nor is one surprised at his distinguishing between
two kinds of imitation, called “copying” and “borrowing.” Under
different names, the separation of these two types is well attested in art
theory at least since the sixteenth century.” Mere copying, Reynolds
believes, is harmful to the young artist. In the first year of his tenure of
the presidency of the Royal Academy, he issued this warning:

I consider general copying as a delusive kind of industry; the student

satisfies himself with the appearance of doing something, he falls into the
dangerous habit of imitating without selecting, and of labouring without any
determinate object; as it requires no effort of the mind, he sleeps over his
work; and those powers of invention and composition which ought particu-
larly to be called out, and put in action, lie torpid, and lose their energy for
want of exercise.*°

As opposed to mere copying, “borrowing” consists of incorporation,

adaptation, and digestion of different motifs and patterns taken from
the works of different artists and different periods. “The artists of all
times and in all places should be employed in laying up materials for
the exercise of his [the student’s] art,” ” we read in the very title of the
second discourse, held in December 1769. “The sagacious imitator”
borrows.®”
These notions were of course commonplace in the second half of the
eighteenth century. Yet one perceives a certain insecurity in Reynolds’s
tone in presenting these generally accepted truths. A competitor to
imitation has arisen; it is imagination. Following the sequence of the
Discourses, we can perceive the change in attitude. In the sixth discourse,
delivered in 1774, he deplores the fashionable trend towards replacing
imitation by inspiration.

Those who have undertaken to write on our art, and have represented it as
a kind of inspiration, as a gift bestowed upon peculiar favourites at their birth,
seem to insure a much more favourable disposition from their readers, and

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have a much more captivating and liberal air, than he who attempts to
examine, coldly, whether there are any means by which this art may be
acquired.*®

It is acquired, needless to say, by imitation. Moreover, “our art,

being intrinsically imitative, rejects this idea of inspiration, more per-
haps than any other.”°? Now Reynolds sings the praise of imitation:
“by imitation only, variety, and even originality of invention, is pro-
duced. | will go further; even genius, at least what generally is so called,
is the child of imitation.””°
By the time Reynolds delivered his thirteenth discourse, only twelve
years later, some far-reaching changes seem to have taken place. Now,
in 1786, the president of the Royal Academy declares in the very title
of his address: “Art not merely Imitation, but under the Direction of
Imagination. In what Manner Poetry, Painting, Acting, Gardening, and
Architecture depart from Nature.” During the 1770s and 1780s, as
James Engell has pointed out, concern with the imagination increased,
and was providing a theoretical backing and philosophical foundation
for the growing interest in psychology.”! The thirteenth discourse shows
how strong an impact this recent concern had on the theory of painting.
Reynolds at this point downgrades reason as a measure of art. It is
imagination that should inform the artist’s actions and guide him in his
work. Aware of the novelty of his claim, he also sensed opposition.
Addressing an audience of young artists, he explained:
This is sometimes the effect of what I mean to caution you against; that is
to say, an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling, in favour of
é, A . Bf
narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories.””

This is not to say that truth to nature is to be abandoned. Allegiance

to the principle of verisimilitude has not changed. The question is only
how to achieve truth to nature. Now Reynolds believes that the road to
this cherished goal does not lead through the land of geometrical axioms
or anatomical studies, but rather through that of the imagination. “For
though it may appear bold to say,” the president proclaims, “the
imagination is here the residence of truth.” ”
It would be futile to enter a critical argument as to what precisely
imagination meant to Reynolds, and whence it drew its images. Rey-

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nolds is not a systematic philosopher, and perfect consistency is not his

prime concern. Following the main lines of his thought, however, one
concludes that he understands imagination less as a creative force that
produces images out of nothing than, to use Diirer’s formulation, as an
“accumulated, secret treasure in one’s heart.”?* We carry in our mind
impressions that are “the result of the accumulated experience of our
whole life.” Reynolds even speaks of the “mass of collective observa-
tion.” The artist’s “animated thoughts,” he says, follow “not perhaps
from caprice or rashness ... but from the fulness of his mind.” The
legitimacy of the imagination is secured by its origin in real life. “It is
our happiness that we are able to draw on such funds.” The ideas
issuing from the artist’s mind “are infused into his design, without any
conscious effort.””°
Imagination produces a new reality, however we may define it, and
that reality, Reynolds declares, differs from what we experience in
everyday life. What, then, about imitation?

Our elements [he says] are laid in gross common nature,—an exact
imitation before us: but when we advance to the higher state, we consider this
power of imitation, though first in the order of acquisition, as by no means
the highest in the scale of perfection.”°

The idea that idealization of forms leads us away from a precise

representation of everyday experience is as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. It is
remarkable, however, that, with the advancing to a “higher state,”
Reynolds drops imitation altogether. One could perhaps believe that
this is only a slip of the pen, or perhaps still another obscurity in his
terminology. But in the observations that follow the reader finds further
support for a superseding of imitation by a new kind of reality produced
by art.
Reynolds first turns to the other arts. Poetry “sets out with a
language in the highest degree artificial, a construction of measured
words, such as never is, nor ever was used by man.”?’ The theater,
“which is said to hold the mirror up to nature,” > also produces an
imaginary reality. To mistake “Garrick’s representation of a scene in
Hamlet for reality” is ignorant praise. “The merit and excellence of
Shakespeare, and of Garrick, when they were engaged in such scenes, is
of a different and much higher kind.” 78 Turning to what was probably

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the most recently acknowledged art, landscape gardening, he says that

“as far as gardening is an art, or entitled to that appeallation, it is a
deviation from nature.” Implicitly referring to the ideology of what is
everywhere called the English Garden, he continues: “for if the true
taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of art, or
any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a
garden.””” All the arts, then, show that they bring about a reality that
differs from the natural one. Imagination, however understood, is the
handle, as it were, by which the new, artificial reality is brought about;
it infuses into that reality its own character.
Making imagination the central concept indicates a disposition that
pervades the philosophy of art as a whole. In fact, the same motives
that led Reynolds to turn imagination into what it is in his theory also
made him see the art of earlier periods, the trends and modes of
representation, in a new light. This is best epitomized in the comparison
of Raphael and Michelangelo, and his worship of Michelangelo.
Comparisons of the relative stature of Raphael and Michelangelo had
been common in discussions on art since the sixteenth century. The
results of this comparing and respective scaling often tell us much about
the period indulging in the pastime. At least since the mid-seventeenth
century, the superiority of Raphael’s art and style had become a matter
of cardinal significance, almost an article of faith, for the thought
promoted and proclaimed in the academies of art. Raphael’s style came
to be the ultimate authority and source of the legitimacy of the acad-
emies’ teaching. Believing in Raphael’s superiority was, then, more than
a matter of taste; it became the defense of the academic tradition
against whatever might endanger it. For reasons we need not analyze
here, Michelangelo’s art was considered less easily imitable and stand-
ardizable. Though nobody would deny his genius, he was felt to be a
kind of explosive force, endangering the continuity of the tradition. The
case of Raphael versus Michelangelo, as the Academy saw it, was lucidly
summed up by Fréart de Chambray.
Raphael Urbino, the most excellent of the Modern Painters, and universally so
reported by those of the Profession, is the Person whose Works I shall propose as
so many Demonstrations of the absolute necessity of exactly observing the
Principles which we have establish’d in this Treatise. And on the contrary, Michael
Angelo, superior in Fame, but far inferior to him in Merits, shall by his

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extravagant Compositions, amply furnish us to discover the Ignorance and Temerity

of those Libertines, who, trampling all the Rules and Maximes under their feet,
pursue only their own Caprices. Hol

Even Roger de Piles, at the turn of the century considered a rebel

who conquered the Academy in the name of color, the nonrrational
element, wrote of Michelangelo:

His Attitudes are, for the most part, disagreeable, the Airs of his Heads fierce,
his Draperies not open enough, and his Expressions not very natural; yet, as wild
as his productions are, there is Elevation in his Thoughts. . . yo!

By 1790, when Reynolds delivered his last address to the Royal

Academy, a great change had taken place. This last discourse was
devoted to Michelangelo. The concluding remark has often been quoted.

I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as

he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear
testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I should desire that
the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this
place, might be the name of — Michael Angelo.'°

What does this worship of Michelangelo mean for the theory of art?
What does it tell us about the processes taking place beneath the
surface, as it were?
Admiration for Michelangelo, it has been said, correctly, was an
admiration of “subjective” art. It involved the admiration of the creative
power and the expressive force of genius, of depth of feeling and of
stormy passions. It was these “subjective” qualities that fascinated
Reynolds, and it was natural for him to discuss them in the context of
the familiar comparison of Raphael and Michelangelo. Raphael, the
president of the Royal Academy knew, had more taste and fancy,
Michelangelo more genius and imagination. The one, he said, excelled
in beauty, the other in energy. Two qualities particularly are embodied
in Michelangelo’s work, in Reynolds’ view, and they are both of crucial
significance for the further history of any reflection on painting. Rey-
nolds himself, it should be kept in mind, does not state his ideas on
these qualities as clearly as we dare to present them here. A careful
reader, however, will not fail to detect them in the text of the Discourses.
The first is what would today be called the artist’s “originality.”

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Reynolds begins by describing Michelangelo’s works as having ‘‘a strong,

peculiar, and marked character.” This assertion of course reiterates
what had been said countless times about the work of the “divine
artist.” But Reynolds is not content with this piece of traditional
characterization; he goes on to say that these works “seem to proceed
from his mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he
never needed, or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help.” 408
Here, it seems, Reynolds implicitly makes two related claims: (1) that
Michelangelo is the ultimate origin of his work, that—in a precise
sense of the word—he is their “creator;” and (2) that Michelangelo
breaks with tradition, his mind being so rich and abundant that he
never needed to look for “foreign help.” What is “foreign help” but
what tradition provides in the way of motifs, patterns, and themes?
Today we know of course that Michelangelo was not as independent of
traditional motifs as the president of the Royal Academy believed him
to be. Yet in our present context it is crucial that Reynolds believed in
Michelangelo’s autonomy. This independence of tradition is seen as a
sign of genius. Raphael’s materials, Reynolds says on the same page,
“are generally borrowed,” whereas Michelangelo’s figures, images, and
shapes follow from his unique mind. In his discussion of Michelangelo,
Reynolds preaches the gospel of the individual artist, an idea that was
to play such an overwhelming part in nineteenth-century thought.
The other quality embodied in Michelangelo’s work is “greatness.”
The reader here clearly perceives the ideas on the Sublime, so important
in the literary criticism and philosophical thought of the time, penetrat-
ing into reflection on painting. What precisely such greatness might be
Reynolds does not tell us. The metaphors he uses in describing it (such
as ‘“‘vehemence,”’ “‘heat, > 66 vast and sublime,” and so on) also do not
help the reader. That it is sheer greatness, ineffable in its essence, is
perhaps best indicated by what Reynolds says about how Michelangelo’s
works impress the beholder. “The effect of the capital works of Michael
Angelo perfectly corresponds to what Bouchardon said he felt from
reading Homer; his whole frame appeared to himself to be enlarged,
and all nature which surrounded him, diminished to atoms.” !
Ineffable greatness, by its very nature, is hard to fit into the artistic
and conceptual patterns of tradition. This is made clear, again, in the
comparison of Raphael and Michelangelo. Nobody excelled Raphael,

r37,
 Modern Theories of Art

our author says, in the judgment that unites his own observations of
nature, the energy of Michelangelo, and the “beauty and simplicity of
the antique.” “But if, as Longinus thinks, the sublime, being the highest
excellence that human composition can attain to, abundantly compen-
sates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for all other def-
iciencies, then Michael Angelo demands the preference.” is
Beneath the surface of a classicizing academicism, and an allegiance
to Raphael as its patron saint, one perceives the approaching upheaval
of Romanticism that was to overturn accepted norms and in the end
lead to questioning the very validity of tradition in the domain of art.
This is the ultimate significance of what the president of the Royal
Academy had to say about Michelangelo. The worship of Michelangelo
became a disruptive force placed at the very foundations of the defense
of tradition in art.

NOTES

1. For the biographical, and intellectual, interrelationship of the two men, see the
still unsurpassed broad representation by Carl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitge-
nossen, 3 vols. (3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1923).
2. See Opere di Antonio Rafaello Mengs, Primo pittore della Maesta Carlo III, re di Spagna,
ec. ec. ec., Publicate da D. Giuseppe Niccola d’Azara, 2 vols. (Parma, 1780). For
Mengs’s art theory, see Monika Sutter, Die kunsttheoretischen Begriffe des Malerphi-
losophen Anton Raphael Mengs (Munich, 1968).
3. For Mengs’s views of the painter as philosopher, cf. Sutter, Die Kunsttheoretischen
Begri e, pp. 190 ff.
4. See Opere di Antonio Raffaele Mengs (Rome, 1787), Il, p. 294; also Karl Borinski, II,
Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie (Leipzig, 1924), p. 214.
5. This division is common. For a particularly important example, see Theories of
Art: From Plato to Winckelmann, pp. 273 ff.
6. Poetics 1448a, here quoted in Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, trans. S. H.
Butcher, 4th ed. (New York, 1951), p. 214.
7. See Winckelmann’s ‘“‘Sendschreiben iiber die Gedanken von der Nachahmung
der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst.” I use the edition of
Winckelmann’s Werke, ed. C. L. Fernow (Dresden, 1808), I, p. 94.
8. I am using the original German edition of Winckelmann’s collected works:
Winckelmann’s Werke, ed. C. L. Fernow, 11 vols. (Dresden-Berlin, 1808-1820).
The first eight volumes appeared in 1801. The original German of The History of

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Ancient Art | am quoting from the Phaidon edition: J. Winckelmann, Geschichte

der Kunst des Altertums (Vienna, 1934). There is no complete English translation of
Winckelmann’s works. Parts of the Thoughts on the Imitation are translated in
Elizabeth Holt, A Documentary History of Art, 11 (Garden City, N. Y., 1958), pp.
336-351. There is an English translation by G. Henry Lodge of The History of
Ancient Art (Boston, 1860), in two volumes. Wherever possible, I have used these
translations. In some cases, I have changed the wording to make it more closely
conform to the original version.
. Winckelmann, Werke, I, p. 7. The translation of that sentence in Holt, p. 337, is
slightly different. It reads: “To take the ancients for models is our only way to
become great, yes, unsurpassable if we can.” The original reads: ‘Der einzige
Weg fiir uns, gross, ja, wenn es moglich ist, unnachahmlich zu werden, ist die
Nachahmung der Alten. ” The term “inimitable” (unnachahmlich), of course, also
means “unsurpassable,” as the Holt translation has it, but it carries a particular
tension in a sentence devoted to imitation.
. Winckelmann, I, p. 20; Holt, II, p. 343.
Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 1, Von Sandrart bis Rumohr (Leipzig,
1921), p. 68.
. Winckelmann, I. p. 34; Holt, Il, p. 350. Franchezza, it should be noted, was
already in the seventeenth century a technical term accepted in the workshops.
Baldinucci, in his Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del disegno (Florence, 1681; reprinted
Florence, n.d.), p. 64, describes franchezza as Ardimento, bravura, |’esser franco.
. Winckelmann, I, p. 6; Holt, II, p. 337.
For Piranesi in the intellectual setting of eighteenth-century Rome, cf. Henri
Focillon, G. B. Piranesi (Paris, 1928).
. Winckelmann, I, p.6; Holt, Il, p. 337.
. See Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, |, p. 56.
. Winckelmann’s paganism has been frequently discussed. In English, see especially
Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1964),
Chapter I. And see also E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Boston,
1958; originally published in Cambridge, 1935), pp. 9-48.
. In his Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de Russie, in J. Assezat and M.
Tourneaux, eds., Denis Diderot: Oeuvres complétes (Paris, 1875—1877), Ill, p. 447.
And see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1977), pp. 94,
Up
. See Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs, in Oeuvres completes, ed. L. Moland (1877-1885),
I, p. 89.
. For the meaning of silence in Wincklemann’s thought, see especially Walter
Rehm, Gétterstille und Gottertrauer (Bern, 1951) pp. 101-182.
. For a brief survey of the origins of the term “classical,” see Enrst Robert
Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), p. 249.
Mie. See the interesting discussion in Walter Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit, (Le-
ipzig, 1936, p. 29 ff.
23. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 256 ff.

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24. For the importance Winckelmann accorded to staying in Rome, see the very
detailed treatment by Karl Justi, Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, especially
Vol. II.
25; The term “Vermégen” used by Winckelmann could also mean “beyond his means
of reproduction.”
26. The notion of “imitation” has of course been discussed countless times. For a
survey of the main meanings of the term in the sixteenth century, see Eugenio
Battisti, “Il concetto d’imitazione nel Cinquecento italiano,” in the author’s
Rinascimento e barocco (n. p., 1960), pp. 175-215.
DI. Winckelmann, I, p. 20; Holt, p. 343.
28. I am here following mainly Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and
Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982), pp. 42 ff.
D2: This he wrote in an introduction (“Erinnerung iiber die Betrachtung der Werke
der Kunst”’) to a collection of his short papers on ancient art. See Werke, I, pp.
241 ff. The sentence quoted is on p. 245.
30. Werke, I, p. 22. The translation of this particular sentence in Holt, p. 344, is
insufficient and possibly misleading. I have therefore substituted a revised trans-
lation.
SIF See J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Vienna, 1934) (henceforth
to be cited as Geschichte) p. 139; and the English translation by G. Henry Lodge
History of Ancient Art (Boston, 1860) (henceforth cited as History), II, p. 28.
32% Geschichte, p. 150; History, II, p. 42.
33: Geschichte, p- 150; History, p. 41.
34. Werke I, p. 35; Holt, p. 351.
35: See Franz Schultz, Klassik und Romantik der Deutschen, (Stuttgart, 1959), I, p. 104.
36. Ibid., pp.104 ff.
Wk Werke I, p. 31; Holt, p. 349.
38. History, II, p- Wily
39. Geschichte, p. 139; History, II, p. 28.
40. For this Platonic, or Plotinian, view that Winckelmann takes as a matter of
course, many quotations could be adduced. See, for example, Geschichte, p. 149;
History, Il, p. 40.
41. Geschichte, p. 164; History, Il, pp. 42, 113.
42. Geschichte, p. 168; History, II, p. 129.
43. Geschichte, p. 168; History, Il, p. 129.
44. Geschichte, p. 155; History, Il, p. 47.
45. Werke I, p. 24. The translation of this sentence in Holt is somewhat garbled.
46. For all the quotations in this passage, see Werke, I. pp. 13-31; Holt, pp. 340—
349.
47. Werke, I, p. 22; Holt, p. 344.
48. Geschichte, p. 133; History, Il, p. 14. It is interesting to note that in the Thoughts
on Imitation, Winckelmann mentions the same reasons for the superiority of
Greek art that he adduces in the History (climate, physical constitution, exercise,
etc.)— with the exception of the social aspect (“freedom”). In the earlier work,

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 Beginnings of the New Age

he speaks only of “the humanity of the Greeks that, in its blooming freedom,
prevented them from introducing brutal spectacles.” See Werke, I, p. 15.
49. Geschichte, p. 137; History, Il, p. 14. The criticism of private patronage anticipates
Romantic, and even nineteenth-century, attitudes. It belongs to the underlying
stratum of social criticism.
50. Geschichte, p. 135; History, Il, p. 18.
5A Geschichte, p. 140; History, Il, p. 31.
a2, Geschichte, p. 148; History, Il. 38.
53: Geschichte, p. 150; History, Il, pp. 40-41.
54. See above, pp. 57 ff.
55: Cf. Albert Dresdner, Die Entstehung der Kunstkritk im Zusammenhang der Geschichte
des europdischen Kunstlebens (Munich, 1915). And see also Lionello Venturi, History
of Art Criticism (New York, 1936; reprinted New York, 1964).
56. For Leonardo, see Theories of Art, 1, pp. 132 ff., and the literature mentioned
there.
Swe See my study “Character and Physiognomy: Bocch on Donatello’s St. George. A
Renaissance Text on Expression in Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975):
413-430.
58. Giovanni Bellori, Descrizzioni delle imagini dipinti da Raffaelle d’Urbino nelle camere del
Palazzo Vaticano (Rome, 1695). Cf. Theories of Art, pp. 315 ff.
59. See Theories of Art, pp. 340 ff.
60. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism
(New York, 1977), pp. 47 ff. The literature on Diderot is of course very large,
though one still misses a careful comprehensive presentation of his views on the
visual arts. But cf. Francis Coleman, The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlighten-
ment (Pittsburgh, 1971) and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
(Princeton, 1951). Dresdner’s Die Entstehung der Kunstkritik im Zusammenhang der
Geschichte des europdischen Kunstlebens, especially Chapter VI, has good observa-
tions.
61. See his “Récherches philosophiques sur Porigine et la nature du beau,” in
Diderot’s Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Verniére (Paris, 1968), pp. 391 ff, p. 402.
Excerpts appear in Diderot’s Selected Writings, translated by Derek Coltman (New
York and London, 1966), pp. 51—60.
62. I use the English translation, done by Creighton Gilbert, available in Elizabeth
Holt, A Documentary History of Art, (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), II, p. 316. For the
French text, see Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, pp. 542 ff. For a brief survey of the
sketch in French painting, cf. Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the
Nineteenth Century (London, 1971), pp. 82 ff.
63. Holt, Il, p. 316; Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 544.
64. These quotations are taken from Diderot’s Essay on Painting. Again | use Creigh-
ton Gilbert’s translation in Holt, A Documentary History of Art, Il, p. 313. For the
French text, see Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 670.
65. See Meyer Schapiro, “Diderot on the Artist and Society,” Diderot Studies V
(1964): 5-11. The sentences quoted are on p. 5.

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66. This is found mainly in the last chapter of Longinus’s On the Sublime.
67. See Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (New York, 1968), pp. 73 ff.
68. See Theories of Art, pp. 349 ff, 352 ff.
69. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, pp. 753 f.
70. From the Essay on Painting, in Holt, A Documentary History of Art, Il, p. 313;
Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 670.
le A note in the Pensées detachées sur la peinture. See Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p.
753. I use the translation of the passage appearing in Francis Coleman, The
Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment, p. 88.
2 Another fragmentary statement in the Penseés detachées. See Diderot, Oeuvres
esthétiques, p. 758.
3s Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 738. I am using the English translation by Coleman,
The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment, p. 114.
74. For a brief indication of what Augustine and Thomas Aquinas thought about the
problem of the creative artist, see Theories of Art, pp. 86 ff.
US. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 328. For an English translation, see Diderot’s Selected
Writings, p. 325. The Paradox on Acting was written in 1769, after Diderot had
already composed all his writings on painting.
76. See Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 524. In the Eloge de Richardson, Diderot grounds
the major part of his praise of Richardson in the moral purport of his fiction.
Cf. Coleman, The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment, pp. 130 ff.
THE: See Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 164; Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 718.
78. Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 165, Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 719.
79: This Diderot wrote in the Salon of 1763. See Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 150;
Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p- 483.
80. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 485; Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 154.
81. Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 163; Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 717.
82. Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 164, Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 718.
83. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses Delivered in The Royal Academy (London and
New York: Everyman’s Library, n.d.), p. 5 (hereafter cited as Discourses).
84. Discourses, p- 6.
85. The most articulated formulation of the two types of imitation is found in
Vincenzio Danti’s /I primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni di tutte le cose che
imitare e ritrarre si possono con I’arte del disegno, now best available in Paola Barocchi,
ed., Trattati d’arte del cinquecento, | (Bari, 1960), pp. 209-269. And see Theories of
Art, pp. 228 ff, with additional literature.
86. Discourses, p- 17.
87. Ibid., p. 86.
88. Ibid., p. 76.
89. Ibid., p. 77.
90. Ibid., p. 78-79.
91. James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981), pp. 184 ff.
de Discourses, p. 210.
 Beginnings of the New Age

93. Ibid., p. 209.

94. For the Diirer quotation, see Theories of Art, p. 218.
O5: Discourses, pp. 209-210.
96. Ibid., pp. 213-214.
ke Ibid., p. 214.
98. Ibid., p. 219.
. Ibid., p. 221. The concern of English thought in the eighteenth century with
gardening as an art form is of course well known. From the large literature, |
shall mention only Marie Louise Goithein, A History of Garden Art (New York,
1979; the original German edition appeared as early as 1926), and H. R. Clark,
The English Landscape Garden (New York, 1980). Shaftesbury seems to have been
the first to stress the basic contrast between “tailored” gardens and untouched
nature.
100. See Fréart de Chambray, Preface to An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, translated
J[chn] E{velyn] (London, 1668). And cf. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of
Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1962; first edition,
1935), pp. 168.ff
101. Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting and the Lives of Painters (London, 1706), pp. 160
ff. And see Monk, The Sublime, p. 172. See also Theories ofArt, pp. 352 ff.
102. Discourses, pp: 263-264.
103. Ibid., p. 67.
104. Ibid., pp. 66—67.
105. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

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 3
Unity and Diversity of
the Visual Arts

I. INTRODUCTION

That the nineteenth century is a complex historical period, combining

contraries, merging continuing traditions and radical changes, is a
truism that does not require further elaboration. This general character-
ization of the age—the period beginning with the sixties or seventies
of the eighteenth century and leading up to the traumatic upheaval of
the first World War in the twentieth—is also valid for the domain of
our reflections. As need hardly be said, this was the period of the
museums, the great public collections, that popularized a veneration of
past achievement, as well as of “new” and revolutionary movements
both in the living arts and in observations on what the past had created.
Conflicting attitudes and currents of thought followed one another and
existed side by side, were linked to each other in succession and in
simulataneous existence. Among the many facets reflecting this contra-
diction of opposites is also the theory of art.
In theoretical reflections on art, two very different attitudes come to
the fore. On the one hand, we may claim that talking about “art as
such,” art in the modern sense of that term, is an invention of the

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eighteenth century that reached its full realization in the nineteenth.

Not only was the term “aesthetics” coined in the eighteenth century,
but its very subject matter, the “philosophy of art,” was invented at
that time. In the view of some historians, it can indeed be applied to
the thought of earlier periods only with certain reservations. Some
scholars at least have observed that art with a capital A, and in its
modern sense, originated in the eighteenth century, and its depth and
possibilities were explored in the course of the nineteenth. What is it
that a poem and a picture, a musical piece and a statue have in common,
although the media in which they are cast, the material nature of the
products, differ so widely? This is a question asked in the nineteenth
century. The notion of “Fine Arts,” or, in the original French, “Beaux
arts,” denoting the visual arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, and
the related minor arts—is also a creation of that time, and it was the
nineteenth century that made this notion a cornerstone of the critical
and theoretical vocabulary used in discussions of art.
As opposed to this universalizing trend, which strove to unify the
various arts, the nineteenth century evinced a profound and lasting
interest in the specific and unique nature of each art and the material
medium in which it operated. Instead of asking what music and painting
may have in common, it was asked how they differ from each other,
and what is the unique medium of each. To make the uniqueness of
each art more manifest, attention was often focused on the material
nature of the work and the way it is perceived by the spectator. A great
deal of thought and observation were devoted to the question of
whether the specific work of art “exists” in a time sequence or in
spatial simultaneity. A poem and a sonata exist in temporal sequence,
word after word and tone after tone; a painting and probably also a
statue, exist in a timeless simultaneity: they display their complex
structure at a single glance. Even more important than the “dimension
of being” that is the proper context of a given art or work of art is the
sense to which it appeals and by which it is perceived. We obviously
perceive music by a different sense than we perceive painting, but what
of poetry and sculpture? The apportioning of each individual art to a
different domain of sense perception was of course a powerful support
in seeing that art as unique, as profoundly differing from all the others.

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At the same time, however, it revealed this art’s links with a broad
realm of perception, and thus made possible a new and much deeper
understanding of the medium and of its character and significance for
the completed work of art. The association of each art with a different
domain of sense perception also illustrates how thought about art in the
last two centuries was intimately linked—though in ways widely differ-
ing from those accepted in the Renaissance—to the sciences, and this
attitude sometimes influenced artistic development itself.
The particularizing trend did not enjoy the good fortune of the
universalizing one. As a rule, philosophers did not take up what was
said in the discussions of this or the other individual art, and the
literature read by a wider audience remained less aware of the links
between a specific artistic medium and a specific sense than of ideas
about the elements common to all the arts. So far as I know, the story
of these reflections has never been told in detail. I shall therefore begin
this chapter with a few early opinions expressing the particularizing
attitude.
The historian considering that long period between the 1760s and
1914, between Herder or Schlegel, on the one hand, and Riegl or
Kandinsky, on the other, must ask himself how the two attitudes were
related. Did the spokesmen of one trend simply ignore what the other
had to say, or did some kind of dialogue develop between them? One
cannot avoid asking, moreover, what was the impact of the very
existence and articulation of the two attitudes on the arts, on aesthetic
thought, and on general culture. The core question is probably this: did
the polar juxtaposition of universal and particular remain the last word,
or was there rather an attempt to bring the various arts into one
comprehensive structure without disregarding, even for methodological
reasons, the basic material and sensual differences of their media and of
the patterns of experiencing their products?
The aesthetic thought of the nineteenth century has been discussed
often and thoroughly. Usually, however, this has been done on an
elevated philosophical level, and the questions here outlined, questions
much closer to the actual arts than to purely philosophical speculation,
have not been systematically investigated. It may therefore be worth

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our while to study the development of these particular problems in

some select and, I hope, representative examples.

1. LESSING

Lessing has been termed “a radical.”” Many a modern reader, acquainted

with Lessing as one of the classical authors who are beyond criticism,
will wonder how a writer thus venerated could have been involved in
the ups and downs of radicalism. Yet the student who goes through
Lessing’s polemical writings with care, attentive both to the views
expressed and to the tone in which they are presented, can well
understand how such a characterization could have come about. “Both
in tone and in intention,” it has been said,' “Lessing’s writings are
always a challenge, part of a dramatic dialogue with a real or imagined
opponent.” But Lessing was a radical not only in tone and intention;
the historical impact of his radicalism was that the intellectual and
artistic scene he left behind him was in many ways profoundly different
from the one he entered upon. One of the aspects of this revolutionary
impact pertains directly to the subject matter of the present chapter.
We must begin by reminding ourselves of some of the chief charac-
teristics of the history of aesthetic reflection before Lessing. For three
centuries the assumption that a basic parallelism prevailed between
poetry and painting, between the literary and the visual arts, was almost
an article of faith. Ever since, in the fifteenth century, Italian humanism
revived the ancient saying—attributed by Plutarch to the half-legen-
dary poet Simonides— that painting is a mute poetry, poetry a loqua-
cious painting, this idea of a close interrelationship, or even a hidden
identity, of the various arts was asserted in ever-renewed formulations.
Horace’s ut pictura poesis——as is painting, so IS poetry — became a credo
of the humanistic tradition. Painting and poetry are sister arts, we hear
time and again; they appeared at a single birth, says Giovanni Paolo
Lomazzo in the late sixteenth century, to lend concreteness to the
metaphor.” In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, scholars,
artists, and writers who continued the humanistic tradition clung to the

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dogma of the parallelism of the arts. Let me give an example: Charles

du Fresnoy opens his Art of Painting with the following verses:

True Poetry the painter’s power displays;

True Painting emulates the Poet’s ways;
The rival Sisters, fond of equal fame,
Alternate change their office and their name,
Bid silent Poetry the canvass warm,
The tuneful page with speaking Picture charm.?

And by the end of the eighteenth century, when Lessing’s Laocoén was
already known in England, Sir Joshua Reynolds could still refer quite
naturally to Shakespeare as “that faithful and accurate painter of nature”
or remark that “Michelangelo possessed the poetical part of our art in
a most eminent degree.” *
Dogmas have serious consequences. The dogmatic belief in the in-
trinsic unity of the various arts guided aesthetic reflection, largely
determining where, on which problems, the emphasis of art theory—
and of poetics—was to be placed. To make manifest the unity of the
arts rather than to reveal the differences that separate them, one has to
concentrate on those stages of the creative process and those features
in the structure of the arts in which unity is stronger than diversity.
Now, to put it very crudely: the arts differ most from each other in the
final realization of the work they create. The completed statue and the
finished poem are so different from each other that one has to make a
serious effort to discover what they have in common. But at an initial
stage of their conception, so at least it seems, they are closer to each
other. One has to remember that the tradition that so emphasized the
unity of the arts was also the tradition so profoundly concerned with
idea. Whether idea is conceived in a more psychological sense, as the
image in the artist’s mind, or in a sociological sense, as a cultural image
transmitted by tradition, in the creative process it is placed at a stage
that precedes any specific artistic activity; it appears before the painter
gives it pictorial form, or before the poet casts it in rhymes. The
intensive concern with this early stage in the creative process fits very
well with a belief in the unity of the arts.
It was the popularity of just this belief—that poetry and painting

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are “sister arts” —that was profoundly shaken by Lessing’s book. The
basic thesis of the Laocodn, the essential statement he wished to make
on the arts, is precisely the rejection of the centuries-old belief that the
arts are intimately related to each other.
To understand Lessing’s position more clearly, it may be in order to
remind ourselves briefly of the obvious question: why, in the first place,
are painting and poetry “sister arts”? What constituted the intimate
family relationship between media that, at a first glance, are so strikingly
different from each other as painting and poetry? In the tradition, an
answer was adumbrated, suggested, although, strangely enough, it was
hardly articulated. Both arts, it was said or intimated, imitate nature,
and both create an illusion of reality. It is not for us here to take up
that thorny problem, the imitation of nature in art, as seen in European
thought. Yet it is surely no exaggeration to claim that this idea, taken
over from Antiquity, was reformulated by every single generation from
the fourteenth or fifteenth century onward, and was the focus of
reflections on art. Inevitably there were also arguments as to what
precisely it is that the arts imitate in nature. Is it the fragmentary piece
of reality we perceive directly? Is it men’s actions? Or is it, in a more
general sense, nature’s structures and modes of operation? The argu-
ments over some of these questions were at times quite bitter, but the
underlying assumption that the arts imitate nature was never called into
question. Lessing, too, still takes this notion for granted. Painting and
poetry are to him specifications of a single aesthetic type of representa-
tion: both are mimetic arts. “Poetry and painting, both are imitative
arts’’—-so he writes in one of the earliest sketches for Laocoén.° It is
true that Lessing does not make art’s imitation of nature a special
subject of discussion, but it is obvious that he accepts the thesis as the
framework of his general theory.
Of greater concern for Lessing is the second reason for the sisterhood
of painting and poetry, namely, that both create illusions. The opening
paragraph of the Laocoén, the paragraph that sets the tone for the whole
work, makes the creation of an illusion the central aim, the true telos,
of the arts. Both painting and poetry, we here read, produce a “similar
effect” on their audience, both place “before us things absent as
present, appearance as reality.”° In his Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts, written

ISI
 Modern Theories of Art

two or three years after the publication of the Laocoén, he recapitulates

the central thesis of the former work. His task, he says in the second
letter,’ is to examine how both the poet and the painter undertake ‘“‘to
arrive at the same goal of illusion by entirely different paths.” Illusion,
then, is the goal of the arts. While Lessing takes it for granted that the
imitation of nature is the essence of art, he does not discuss the matter;
to illusion, however, he frequently returns, and considers how it is
produced.
Illusion in art, in the authentic sense of the term, refers to instances
where an image is taken by an observer to be the physical object it
represents. It gives rise to the sort of mistake Zeuxis made when he
tried to lift the painted curtain from Parrhasius’ picture. Renaissance
texts provide us with many examples of this view of illusion. Here we
often read of birds picking at painted grapes or of horses neighing at
the pictures of mares. If such perfect illusion—a real trompe I’oeil —
occurs at all in reality, it is obviously very rare. Our main interest in
such effects, or the stories about them, is theoretical; they are presented
as the extremes of a particular species of pictorial effect. Otherwise, in
the Renaissance this could not have been. It is difficult to believe that
an educated observer, let alone a Leonardo or an Erasmus, could
actually have assumed that a piece of painted surface could ever be
mistaken for a living person or for a wide landscape extending into
depth. Unfortunately, there is no detailed study of what such state-
ments as “misleading the beholder” or “mistaking a painting for reality”
actually meant in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century parlance. But one can
be sure, I think, that, whatever the semantic scope and emotional
connotation of such phrases, they were primarily meant to express a
theoretical attitude. What is this attitude? A detailed analysis would go
far beyond the limits of the present study, but one thing stands out
clearly: it is the tendency to blur the dividing line between actual,
physical reality (what is portrayed) and its representation in art. How
could the painted image be mistaken for the real object if they did not
have an identical structure? It is the artist’s merit to show that identity,
to make the structure of nature manifest in the forms of his work.
It is here that Lessing clearly deviates from the tradition, even if he
does not explicitly say so. It is also here that he becomes a source of

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modern trends of thought. | shall try to put the idea underlying

Lessing’s treatise freely, without strictly following his own wording.
The illusionary reality produced by art is not a duplication of external
reality; a painting does not duplicate a piece of nature. The line
separating one domain from the other can never be obscured. What is
presented to us by even the most faithful artistic imitation of nature is
a translation of that nature, or a piece of it, into another language. This
of course is not to say that Lessing in any way rejected the idea that
the creation of illusion is the final aim of the arts. We have just seen
that, in his view, all the arts strive to present something absent as
present. But his way of seeing the nature of the aesthetic illusion differs
from what had been accepted for centuries.
Lessing used the term “sign” to describe the means of creating a
work of art, and from his scattered remarks it clearly follows that the
painting or the poem is a system of signs. Modern semiologists have
good reason for their intensive concern with Lessing’s doctrine of signs.®
Unfortunately, he never explained what precisely he understood by
“signs,” he did not give us, as one would say today, a theory of signs.
But since the early eighteenth century, it should be kept in mind, the
term was occasionally used in aesthetic reflection, and in discussing
certain themes it even acquired a kind of currency. Because Lessing was
familiar with these uses, a brief look at what it meant before him may
help us to better understand his own usage. Originally the term was
rarely applied to the visual arts; yet in those rare cases its connotation
is obvious. In 1708, Roger de Piles wrote in his Cours de peinture par le
principe that “‘words (les paroles) are never held to be the things them-
selves ... the word is only a sign for the thing.”” This statement still
breathes Renaissance air. But only a decade later, the learned and
influential Abbé Dubos—that somewhat diffuse who anticipated so
much of modern thought —claims that “painting never employs artif-
cial signs, as does poetry, but uses natural signs.” Now, it would seem
that both artificial and natural signs imply a certain distance between
the reality represented and its representation in art. But here Dubos
hesitates: “Maybe I am not speaking correctly when I say that painting
employs signs: it is nature itself that painting places before our eyes.” a
Few definitions could illustrate as clearly the true nature of illusion as

1§3
 Modern Theories of Art

Dubos’ retraction. If painting uses signs, it follows from what he says,

it does not cancel the gap between itself and the nature represented;
but because it places nature itself before our eyes, it has no need, and
also no room, for signs. There is, then, no sign without a basic
difference between what signifies (the work of art) and what is signified
(nature).
Lessing, it need hardly be said, was familiar with the tradition we
have here represented by Roger de Piles and the Abbé Dubos. As is
well known, he was attentive to discussions among the scholars and
critics of his time, and he refers to them whenever he raises some
controversial ideas or notions. Like Dubos, be speaks of “artificial” and
“natural” signs, but without hesitation he includes the “natural” ones
in the domain of signs. Artificial and natural signs differ from each
other in many respects, and to some of them I shall shortly return; but
both of them are signs; that is, in no way are they identical with what
they portray. A crucial passage in the sixteenth chapter of Laocoén
begins: “If it be true that painting, in its imitations, makes use of
entirely different means and signs from those which poetry em-
ploys. ...”” The question, then, is not whether the painter in his work
uses signs; it is only whether the signs he employs are, or are not,
different from the signs the poet employs. As a modern semiologist
would claim that an “iconic sign” is no less a sign than an “aniconic”
one, so Lessing says that the pictorial sign is essentially no less a sign
than the poetic one. Now, if you remember what a sign means, you
cannot help concluding that in painting as well as in poetry an un-
bridgeable gap remains between nature and art. Lessing rejects a basic,
though often only implied, assumption of Renaissance aesthetics.
In outlining Lessing’s view of the sign as the central notion of artistic
creation we have emphasized the difference between the sign and what
it signifies, a difference that is of the very essence of the sign. But here
we run into a paradox. If the sign is in its very essence different from
what it signifies, how then does it manage to produce an illusion?
Illusion, however interpreted, suggests a unity, or at least a close
relationship, between the representation and what it represents.
To dissolve this paradox, we have to remember what, in Lessing’s
view, actually happens when we aesthetically experience a work of art.

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A work of art, it has been said in a recent analysis of Lessing’s aesthetic

doctrine,'' exists on two levels. One is the material stratum, the piece
of matter in which the work is shaped as a material object, that is, the
carved stone, the painted surface of a panel or a stretch of wall. The
other is the image of an immaterial appearance, the mental picture
dwelling in the imagination that has been produced by our experiencing
the shaped material object. This appearance exists, of course, only in
the beholder’s mind; it is, needless to say, an illusionary object.
The subject of aesthetic experience is only that imaginary, illusionary
object that dwells in the spectator’s (or reader’s, or listener’s) mind.
Whenever the aim of art is achieved and we perceive the absent as
present, it is that illusionary object, the appearance in our mind, that
does the job. The art work as a material object only excites our
imagination, it only awakens the images of the absent things. Aesthetic
reception passes through, and goes beyond, the sensible stratum of
works of art in order to reach the appearance. At that stage, we can
say, the spectator’s imagination actualizes the aesthetic object. Or, as
Lessing puts it, “for that which we discover to be beautiful in a work
of art is not discovered by our eye, but by the force of our imagination,
through the eye” (p. 93).
Lessing’s attitude, it should be noted, is not “psychological” or
“subjective” in the sense these terms have acquired in everyday talk.
The true aesthetic object, dwelling in our imagination, may be intangi-
ble, it may remain a mere “appearance” that cannot be precisely
pinpointed and measured, yet it is far from being arbitrary or a matter
of chance, not subject to strict laws. On the contrary, Lessing believes
that the very emergence and forms of these appearances are a matter of
predictable regularity.
The ability to form in the mind an aesthetic object is a gift granted
to man only, setting us apart from all other creatures. It is an ability
that elevates man beyond the stage of immediate perception, above a
close and immediate dependence on nature. “Animal eyes,” Lessing
writes in a preparatory note for the Laocoén, “are harder to deceive than
human eyes; they see nothing but what they see; we, on the other hand,
are seduced by the imagination so that we believe we see even what we
don’t see.” '* Here Lessing’s historical position becomes strikingly man-

1§5
 Modern Theories of Art

ifest, and, as in a flash, we become aware of how far removed he is

from the humanistic tradition that originated in the Renaissance. Fif-
teenth- and sixteenth-century authors endlessly repeated the well-
known stories of birds and horses being misled by painted grapes or
mares. The purpose of telling these stories is clear: they were intended
to state how close to nature, and therefore how “convincing,” a good
artistic representation can be. The lifelikeness of a good representation
seemed to be rooted in nature itself, and therefore the criterion of the
trompe l'oeil is a universal one, valid for all creatures. Lessing reversed
that position. The bird and the horse, it follows from what he says, are
unable to see anything that is not actually there. They are blind to art
because they cannot see the absent as present. The gift of aesthetic
experience is a hallmark of man’s distinct place in the world.
Our perception of the work of art, it also follows, is no passive
reception of an imprint made by the work of art that exists “out there,”
beyond the reach of the beholder. What we see in aesthetic experience
is, in actual fact, the product of an interaction between the work qua
natural, material object and the beholder. If ever there was a thinker
who granted the beholder a real share in aesthetic experience, it was
Lessing. It should be noted in passing, although we cannot discuss this
here, that he does not accord a similar interest and attention to the
artist. While Lessing comes back time and again to the spectator (or
reader), he has little use for the artist.
The significance of the beholder’s share should be one of the artist’s
leading concerns. In shaping his work, the artist-should avoid anything
that prevents the spectator from contributing his full share. Thus, a
painter should never represent the highest degree of passion. This is so
because “Beyond this [the highest degree of passion] there is nothing,
and to show the most extreme point is to bind the wings of Fancy, and
to compel her, inasmuch as her power cannot go beyond the impression
on the senses, to busy herself with feeble and subordinate images,
beyond which is that visible fulness of expression which she shuns as
her boundary” (p. 71). The beholder’s aesthetic experience and his
active contribution to it have, then, a direct impact on the artist’s
consideration, a subject to which we shall return in the course of this
chapter.

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From a presentation, even if only in the most general terms, of

Lessing’s broad aesthetic principles, let us now turn to the arts them-
selves. In his view, what are the criteria for distinguishing between one
art and another? And what are the principles governing the grouping of
the individual arts into larger, more comprehensive units? Two groups
of arts, Lessing claims, are irreducible to each other, and they are thus
the ultimate constituents of the world of art. The two groups are more
distinctly represented by painting and poetry. The reason for distin-
guishing them is not any specific, even if most important, characteristic;
rather it is something that involves their whole existence. The best way
to grasp what distinguishes between them is to try answering the
question, what is the mode of existence of the work pertaining to one
or the other groups? In what dimension of being is a painting, as
opposed to a poem, located? Lessing attempts, so it seems, to make this
difference not a matter of subjective impression but one of objective
being (though, as we shall immediately see, he cannot avoid the specta-
tor’s or reader’s perception. Painting and sculpture, which is affiliated
with it, exist in space; poetry and all the literary arts, as well as music,
exist in time. This well-known division is clearly formulated. “But I will
try to consider the matter upon first principles,” Lessing says at the
opening of the sixteenth chapter of the Laocoén. “I reason in this way.
If it be true that painting, in its imitations, makes use of entirely
different means and signs from those that poetry employs; the former
employing figures and colors in space, the latter articulate sounds in
time ... it follows that painting and poetry represent objects of a
different nature” (p.131).
The problem has frequently been discussed; nevertheless it may not
be altogether superfluous to ask what Lessing means by “space” and
“time” in connection with the arts. It should be noted that, about
twenty years before Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Lessing
does not conceive of space as some kind of imagined container within
which objects are placed. To put it boldly—and disregarding a great
many philosophical subtleties —we could say that Lessing understands
space as a way of perceiving objects. Instead of being a container, it is a
type of intuition. The character of this type of perception is best
described by saying that it shows us everything as coexisting, that it is

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a simultaneous kind of vision. Space is simultaneity of things in a

synoptic view, in the homogenoous form of vision. Things in space are
“what the eye surveys at once” or that “which in nature would be seen
at once” (pp. 140-44).
It is interesting for the study of Lessing’s psychology that in the
reality of vision, as he believes, simultaneity is only an illusion. What
really happens when we view objects in space is not a simultaneous
grasp of the various parts, but a process in time. This process, however,
takes place so quickly that we are left with the illusion of timelessness,
of instant and simultaneous vision. “‘How shall we attain to the clear
representation of a thing in space?” Lessing asks, and answers “First we
consider the separate parts of it, then the combination of these parts,
and lastly the whole.” The object, then, is not really seen at once, but
in a sequence of steps: first the individual parts, then their combina-
tions, finally the whole. Lessing here pictures visual, spatial perception
as the building up of the object in the spectator’s mind. “Our senses
achieve these different operations with so astounding a speed, that they
appear to us to be but one, and this speed is necessarily indispensable
when we have to attain a conception of the whole, which is no more
than the result of the conception of the parts, and of their combination”
(p. 140).
The student of perceptual processess, Lessing might have agreed, will
be interested in the rapid surveying that lies behind a seemingly simul-
taneous impression; to the naive spectator, to the person standing in
front of a view of nature or a painting, this invisible process does not
matter. To him, spatial perception is and remains simultaneous. Because
the arts depend on the way they are perceived, the student of art and
aesthetics necessarily disregards what lies beyond the realm of percep-
tibility. To him, space is completely different in structure from time.
Poetry, unlike painting, materializes in time; its very structure is that
of succession, which is necessarily a temporal succession. Poetry, Less-
ing tells his readers, fashions its signs from “ce “articulate sounds in time”
(p. 131). You can see this best by simply reading a poem aloud: the
former sound, or word, must altogether disappear from the world, must
become a remembered past, for the next sound or word to be heard
and to be intelligible. The listener or reader slowly builds up in his

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mind the whole poem or narrative. The temporal structure of poetry

and narrative is too well known to be described here in detail. Let us
only emphasize that, in Lessing’s view, the astounding speed of scanning
—necessarily a process in time—that makes viewing a picture appear
as timeless is absent from the literary arts. The reciting of a poem or
the telling of a story takes place at a slow pace, it is extended over a
considerable stretch of time. In other words, the passing of time
becomes a perceptional quality in literature. “Let it be granted,” Lessing
says in the seventeenth chapter of the Laocoén, “that the poet leads us
in the most perfect order from one part of the object to another; let it
be granted that he knows how to make the combination of the whole
clear to us,—how long a time does he require for the purpose? That
which the eye at once surveys he ennumerates to us with marked
slowness by degrees, and it often happens that we have forgotten the
first when we have arrived at the last” (p. 140).
Does this juxtaposition of the arts—those materialized in space and
those realized in time—in any way imply a difference in the value with
which each of them is endowed? Lessing’s explicit aim is not to
pronounce value judgments on the arts; what he sets out to do is to
describe their boundaries. And yet the student cannot disregard the fact
that Lessing’s attitude is not altogether “‘value-free.” Behind the analyt-
ical description there is an attitude of evaluation. Usually this attitude
remains in the background, but sometimes it is made manifest. Having
read through the Laocoén as well as some other of his writings pertinent
to our themes, one cannot help feeling that Lessing has some image of
a hierarchy of the arts. In fact, he may well have paved the way for
such systematic constructions as were presented only one or two
generations after his death. It may therefore be justifiable to ask what
his criteria were for placing an art on a higher or lower level.
Lessing does not tell us what his yardsticks are for measuring the
value of the individual arts, or how they are linked to his overall view
of art. An attentive reader, however, cannot fail to discover both the
nature of the criteria employed and the reasons for using them. In the
following observations, | shall attempt to present—in a short schematic
way that Lessing would immediately reject —both his criteria and their
justification in his thought.

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The Beholder’s Share. The aesthetic object dwelling in the beholder’s mind
is, we have just seen, the result of an interaction between the work of
art as a material object and the spectator. It follows from Lessing’s
doctrine that the greater the spectator’s activity stimulated by the work
of art, the better the work. This seems to be true for the arts in general.
The different arts allow, and even call for, different degrees of creative
activity on the part of their audiences. The “natural sign,” though a
“sign” in the full sense of that word, requires of its audience less
“translation” into a different idiom than does the “artificial” sign. When
the poet describes an object, that object is not fully present, it doesn’t
arrest the imagination. “With the poet,” Lessing says, “a garment is no
garment: it covers nothing: our imagination sees entirely through it” (p.
go). The literary description of an object expands, it is built up in the
reader’s mind, and in that process his share is obviously increased. In a
long passage devoted to another subject (the temporality of literary
description), Lessing deals with a famous example of the literary de-
scription of a material object, Homer’s account of the shield of Achilles
— “that famous picture,” Lessing writes, “in consequence of which
more especially Homer has from all antiquity been considered as the
teacher of painting.” It is worth our while to follow his description:
A shield, it will be said, is surely an individual corporeal object, the detailed
description of the successive parts of which cannot be allowed to belong to
the province of the poet. And yet Homer has described this shield in more
than a hundred admirable verses. ... Homer does not paint this shield as
perfect and already made. He has availed himself of the much praised artifice
of changing that which is co-existent in his design into that which is succes-
sive, and thereby presenting us with the living picture of an action instead of
the wearisome description of a body. We do not see the shield but the divine
master as he works. ... We do not lose sight of them (the figures) till all are
finished. Now they are finished, and we stand amazed over the work, but it is
with the believing amazement of an eye-witness who has seen the work
wrought. (p. 149)

The eyewitness is, in fact, a partner in the poet’s conjuring up of the

object, he is an associate in the creative process of the literary descrip-
tion. Had he been presented with the shield itself, or had he been
looking at a material depiction of the finished shield, he could not have

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participated to the same degree. In poetry the beholder’s share is larger

than in painting.

The Material Nature as a Constraint. The work of the visual arts, unlike the
product of poetry and narrative, necessarily has a material substratum
—the carved stone, the cast bronze, the painted panel. This material
layer Lessing conceives as a boundary, as a limitation on the spectator’s
creative imagination. Frequently he speaks of the painting’s or the
statue’s ‘material confines” (materielle Schranken.) It should be remem-
bered that Lessing was no Platonist; his rational mind was opposed in
many ways to the mystical leanings that characterize the Platonic trend
in medieval and Renaissance tradition. And yet he seems to have taken
over some attitudes that originally belonged to mystical Platonism. In
that tradition of thought, matter was conceived as an ultimate bound-
ary, a “prison,” as it was sometimes called. Without going so far,
Lessing views matter in a similar way, even where aesthetic matters are
concerned. He does not stress, for example, that the material character
of the painting or the piece of sculpture confer on the picture or statue
a greater concreteness; what he stresses is that the material layer is a
confining limitation.
Matter is not only a metaphysical limitation, as the Platonists saw it,
it also has direct aesthetic implications. The artist, we remember, should
devote great attention to choosing the right moment of an action for
representation, and he should avoid showing “the most extreme point
of action.” Why should this be so? “I believe,” says Lessing, “that
the single moment to which the material limits of art confine all her
imitations will lead us to such considerations” (p. 70). The poet’s
position is altogether different. The material confines do not seem to be
valid for his work. Even where he uses personifications, they are not
subject to material confines. “Although the poet likewise makes us
think of the goddess as a human figure, he has nevertheless removed all
ideas of coarse and heavy matter and he has enlivened her body with a
force which exempts her from the laws of human locomotion.”

What Can Be Represented? Perhaps the most crucial difference between

the arts is what one or the other can, or cannot, represent. The range

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of the various arts is not identical; what lies within the reach of one
may well be beyond the reach of the other. Both groups of arts, the
pictorial as well as the poetical, have their limitations, but the bound-
aries are not the same. Many a direct sense perception may well be
beyond what the poet can directly describe. How can he, to adduce an
example that has had a long history, describe in words the apparently
simple sensation “red”? But Lessing is not so much concerned with
pointing out the poet’s limitations; what he mainly wants to show is
what the painter cannot do. There are large parts of reality that poetry
can describe and literature can narrate but that the visual arts cannot
represent. Lessing’s treatise on fables, an early work that in many
respects is a precursor of the Laocodn, “‘puts the painter in his place,” to
use Gombrich’s formulation (p. 141). The test of a good fable, Lessing
here declares, is that it cannot be properly illustrated. “A fable is an
action,” consisting of a series of changes that form one whole. “I can
consider it as an infallible test that a fable is poor, that it does not
deserve the name fable, if its supposed action is capable of being
completely depicted.” '3 In an image, he says a little earlier, “I can well
detect a moral truth, but this does not mean that it [the image] is a
fable.” Tantalus, thirsting while standing in a stream, is an image
showing that one can starve in the midst of plenty. But is this image
therefore also a fable?—so runs Lessing’s rhetorical question. The
answer cannot be in doubt. The fable cannot be depicted.
Lessing’s denial of the picture’s ability to fully illustrate the story is
not only a theoretical statement; it takes place within a definite cultural
context. It has convincingly been said that Lessing here specifically
directed his argument against the tradition of emblems. An emblem, we
remember, combines word and image in order to convey to the reader-
spectator a moral message. It is of course not a matter of chance that
the tradition— one is tempted to say the culture—of emblems evolved
within the humanistic movement, from the sixteenth to the late eight-
eenth century, and that the audience for emblem books consisted of
those learned circles we usually call “humanists.” The popularity of the
emblem book in the humanist tradition cannot surprise us. The organic
combination of word and image, the very essence of the emblem, is yet
another version of the humanistic credo in the arts, namely that they

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are parallel to each other. An emblem is, as a matter of principle, a

concrete example of ut pictura poesis.
As we know, Lessing rejects this principle. He therefore also rejects
the emblem and denies that the fable can be illustrated. The difference
in range between painting and poetry is made manifest in many ways.
Let us come back to the Laocodn, where Lessing deals with one striking
example of this difference. Homer, he says, “creates two classes of
beings and of actions, visible and invisible. Painting is incompetent to
represent this difference. . . .”” He polemicizes with Count Caylus, who
placed the invisible actions in unbroken sequence with the visible ones.
Painting is plainly incapable of representing the invisible. “The worst
consequence,” he goes on to say, “is this, that as the distinction
between visible and invisible is taken away by the painter, all the
characteristic features are immediately lost, by means of which this
higher kind is elevated above the lesser” (p. 119).

Representation of Complexity. A particular case of the different range of

the individual arts, of what each of them can or cannot represent, is of
such significance in our context that it must be considered separately.
To what extent can painting and poetry render the complexity of a
subject, particularly of a figure, without becoming unintelligible? Some
of Lessing’s most interesting observations are made on this particular
point.
We have just seen that painting cannot depict the invisible, that it
has no means of dealing with what goes beyond sheer, regular visibility.
This is also true for the images of the gods. Painting reduces the various
ontological levels of the Homeric world to the homogeneous world of
everyday visual experience “Greatness, strength, speed, qualities which
Homer keeps in reserve for his gods in a higher and more wonderful
degree that those which he attributes to his best heroes, sink down to
the level of the common measure of humanity, and Jupiter and Aga-
memnon, Apollo and Achilles, Ajax and Mars, become entirely beings
of the same kind ...” (p. 121). To keep them apart from each other,
the painter endows them with what we would today call “iconographic
attributes,” Zeus’s thunderbolt, Apollo’s lyre or bow, and so on. But
are not these very attributes admissions of painting’s inability to mani-

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fest the gods’ essence directly, to make their appearance intelligible

without external aids?
And how can the painter represent the complexity of a single figure?
How can he show that the very same figure has different, often even
conflicting qualities of character? Lessing enters into vigorous debate
with Joseph Spence (1699-1768), a representative of the school of
speculative methology that continued some Neoplatonic trends into the
late eighteenth century. In his Polymetis (1747), Spence attempts to
explain the nature of the Greek gods on the basis of their representation
in Greek art. This leads Lessing to his own subject, the relations
between the arts, and what each art can represent. “Of the mutual
resemblance which subsists between Poetry and Painting, Spence has
the most extraordinary notions” (p. 102). Lessing here comes back to
his old claim: Spence does not see the difference between the arts, he
does not notice that even where they portray the very same subject,
each of them slightly modifies it. In fact, the poet and the painter do
not show or represent exactly identical gods or spiritual beings. ““The
gods and spiritual beings, as represented by the artist, are not entirely
the same as those whom the poet makes use of.” Here Lessing does not
speak of the difference of medium, but of a difference in content, a
change in the nature and identity of the figure. “To the artist they are
personified abstracta, which must always maintain the same characteris-
tics if they are to be recognized. To the poet, on the other hand, they
are real acting creatures, which, in addition to their general character,
have other qualities and affections, which, as circumstances afford the
opportunity, predominate” (p. 104).
At a first reading, this seems rather shocking. The visual arts, the
works of which have a material, tangible substratum, which operate
with natural signs, which provide an immediate, direct sensual experi-
ence—it is these arts that create abstractions. The reason for Lessing’s
view is of course obvious. The visual arts, freezing the figures they
depict into one moment, one unchangeable view, do not have the ability
to manifest the variety of aspects, the multitude of properties that
actually belong to the nature of a mythological figure, and, were they
to try to express that variety, they would necessarily become illegible.

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2. HERDER’S PLASTIK

It is perhaps best to start a brief review of thought devoted to the

individual arts with the treatise by Herder known as Plastik. This is
among the earliest modern documents attesting to the attempt to
interpret the particular nature of an artistic medium by referring to a
specific field of sense experience. Plastik was a long time in the making;
the first drafts predate the final version, published in 1778, by a decade.
This was a creative decade in the young Herder’s career, a time when
he wrote his important Uber neue deutsche Literatur (Concerning Recent
German Literature) (1766-1767) and Critical Forests (Kritische Walder).
Yet frequent rewriting did not necessarily lead to a clear and simple
diction; Plastik, written in a fervent style, lacks the lucidity and transpar-
ence that sometimes accompanies slowly formed masterpieces of thought.
In spite of some repetitiveness and ambiguity, however, Herder’s Plastik
is a signpost in the evolution of modern thought on the arts; it
anticipates a great deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reflection,
and has certainly merited more attention that it has received.
Herder himself tells his readers what motivated him to write Plastik.
“When philosophizing about the arts was still the fashion,” he discloses,
“I searched for a long time for an actual concept that would distinguish
between beautiful shapes and colors, sculpture and painting, and—l]
did not find one.”'* Painting and sculpture were always considered in
one and the same context. In that short passage, Herder both describes
his historical position and the aim of his investigation. His historical
position is clearly defined by his taking the system of the “fine arts,”
the beaux arts, for granted. The long periods preceding the modern age,
periods in which artists had to prove the inherent value of their
occupation and to set themselves off from mere craftsmen, had long
passed. That there is some basic common value uniting the visual arts is
no longer doubted. What really concerns Herder is the underpinning of
the individual arts, an underpinning that has nothing to do with the
social or intellectual standing of painting or sculpture, but rather with
their very nature as unique arts. He is well aware of the profound
differences between painting and sculpture, and he sets out to inquire

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into the basis of these differences. His answer, put in a nutshell, is this:
“To sight belong only planes, paintings, figures of one plane, but bodies
and shapes of bodies belong to touch” (p. 249). In other words, the
two-dimensional art of painting appeals to sight, whereas the three-
dimensional art of sculpture appeals to the sense of touch. Simple and
self-evident as such a statement may seem to a twentieth-century
reader, in actual fact it constitutes a far-reaching revolution, and reveals
still another facet of Herder’s originality.
Students of the eighteenth century need not be told of the innova-
tiveness and significance of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and |
shall not attempt here to draw his portrait.'° In the present context, |
should like only to emphasize one characteristic of his thought —his
looking, in every field of study, for the aboriginal sources, for the
primitive and first layers. Because Herder’s interest were so diversihed,
the “sources” and origins he deals with are of a sometimes bewildering
variety. What these sources have in common, however, is that, whether
referring to religion or painting, poetry or world history, they are
always presented as specific and real, never as abstract ideas. A good
example is his interpretation, undertaken together with his teacher, the
German philosopher Hamann, the “magus of the North,” of the Book
of Genesis. It has correctly been said that the aim of this interpretation
is not to discover some abstract notion; Herder and Hamann studied
the Bible for its graphic portrayal of the primitive Hebrews. The key to
this exegesis, it has been maintained, lies in the “inversion of the com-
mon eighteenth century appraisal of the relative-merits of the concrete
and the abstract. The concrete now became the natural; the pictorial
was not crude and obfuscatory but more powerfully human. The
abstract was incomprehensible and arid.”'© In the same vein, he ap-
proached Ossian almost with veneration, placing him on the same lofty
height as Homer.
The same trend of thought is seen in Herder’s attempts to derive the
arts from some primeval layers of human experience. And what could
be more primeval and concrete than the specific senses, and the expe-
rience of the surrounding world that they transmit to us? “Were all our
notions in the sciences and the arts,” writes Herder, “reduced to their
origins, or could they thus be reduced, connections would be separated

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and separations would be connected, as we don’t find them in that

great confusion of all things we call life or reality” (p. 249).
The eighteenth century was not indifferent to the sense of touch.
Even though that sense was not analyzed in any detail comparable to
Herder’s, an object’s tangibility seems to have been accepted as the
ultimate proof of its independent existence as well as of the ability of
our senses to provide us with reliable and irrefutable information about
the surrounding world. The term “object” regained its original meaning:
something thrown in our way, something sensually encountered, with-
out knowing or expecting it. Touch, even if not sufficiently distin-
guished in its nuances, thus becomes a major source of knowing the
world. In his treatment of touch, Herder went far beyond what the
eighteenth century had to say, but in essence he continued an inherited
trend of thought.
Vision and touch, the senses that are the sources of the two basic
arts of painting and sculpture, these Herder juxtaposes in various
respects. We have already seen that lines and colors appeal to vision,
shapes and bodies to touch. But Herder goes further and dwells with
particular emphasis on two additional aspects. First, vision makes us
perceive a dematerialized world, and it is therefore of particular affinity
to the world of phenomena, of bodiless appearance. “A body that we
would never experience as such by touch ... would remain to us
forever a handle of Saturn, a sling of Jupiter, i.e. a phenomenon, an
apparation. The ophtalmit with a thousand eyes, without a feel, without
a touching hand, will all his life remain in Plato’s cave” (p. 244). The
dematerialized representation does not evoke real reactions. You do not
wish to grasp the radiant image (p. 247). Because images lack material
reality, Herder believes, vision is “the most artificial, the most philo-
sophical sense.” (p. 250). No wonder therefore that the art based on
vision, that is, painting, shares with its sensual origin its philosophical,
ultimately unreal, character.
The two-dimensionality of painting, and of vision, reveals that its
reality is incomplete. “That a statue can be seen, nobody has doubted;
but can one determine from vision what is a beautiful shape? . . . This
one cannot only doubt, but outrightly deny” (p. 251). Vision, he later
says, “destroys the beautiful statue instead of creating it” (p. 252).

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The seeing eye is opposed by the touching hand, and it is to the

feeling, touching hand that the fullness of reality opens up. This is a
general human trait, and it can be seen in all stages of life. “Come into
the child’s playroom,” Herder addresses his reader, “and watch how
the little empirical creature seizes, grasps, takes, weighs, touches, mea-
sures with his hand and feet, in order to acquire for himself faithfully
and securely the heavy, first and necessary concepts of bodies, figures,
magnitude, space, distance” (p. 245). What is impenetrability, hardness,
smoothness, form, shape, roundness—of all this the eye cannot tell
you much, of this you learn from “the grasping, touching hand” (p.
245). What you can learn from the hand is the “tangible truth.” While
vision destroys the statue, touch revives it. The introvert lover who
apparently wanders around a statue or a column aimlessly experiences
its beautiful round shape. “His eyes become hands, the light ray a
finger. ... The statue lives ... it speaks, not as if he would (only) see
it, but as if he would feel and touch it. A column coldly described gives
us as little idea as painted music; better let it stand and go on” (p. 253).
Sculpture, born of touch, is able to capture in a single statue the full
reality of the object represented.
The antithesis between painting and sculpture, or vision and touch,
is stated in an aphorism: “In vision there is dream [that is, a lack of all
reality], in touch there is truth” (p. 247).
Here it may be worth our while to stop for a moment and look at
Herder’s sources or predecessors for this particular comparison. How
does he relate to these forerunners? The comparison between the arts,
I need hardly repeat, is a venerable topic, one that surfaces at several
stages of European intellectual history. The best-known version is
probably the literary genre that the Italian Renaissance called paragone.
For our purpose it will be sufficient to remind the reader of the most
famous Renaissance text in the paragone literature, Leonardo da Vinci’s
notes concerning the comparison of the arts. Leonardo, too, bases the
arts on our senses, though he is not as systematic and consistent in this
respect as Herder. But for him, too, painting follows from vision, and
music from hearing. But here some interesting differences between
Leonardo and Herder strike the careful student. For Leonardo, the
major confrontation is that between painting, on the one hand, and

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poetry and music, on the other, that is, between the art of spatial
simultaneity and the arts of temporal succession. Sculpture occupies a
rather marginal place in Leonardo’s thought. How does he compare it
with painting?
“After painting comes sculpture,” says Leonard, “‘a very valuable art,
but it is not produced by minds of such excellence as is painting.” He
goes on to mention the aspects in which painting excels, and which are
altogether absent in sculpture. These are perspective and shadow. In
both respects, the statue is just an object, like any other material object,
and the artist does not have to create anything; nature herself helps
him.'’ “The first marvel that appears in painting is that it appears to be
detached from the wall. ... In comparison with this, the sculptor
creates his works so that they appear as they are” (#54). A statue,
produced by nature and man, belongs in greater part to nature (#50).
Without going into detail, we can say that Leonardo conceives of
sculpture as being, in some respects, closer to nature than is painting.
In this respect, there is a certain affinity between him and Herder. The
appreciation of the fact may be quite different: to Leonardo it is a
reason for criticism, to Herder a reason for praise; on the fact itself
they agree.
Another distinction between painting and sculpture that Leonardo
mentions is of a social nature. Painting is a “liberal art,” sculpture a
“mechanical art” (#49ff); while a painting is produced by “mental
analysis,” a statue is produced with great physical effort, causing “phys-
ical fatigue” (#51); the sculptor sweats, he is covered with paste and
powder, he looks like a baker; the painter works in the quiet of his
workshop, wearing his fine clothes. Of this social distinction, it should
be noted, nothing survives in Herder.
Herder’s further distinction between painting and sculpture, contin-
uing of course his distinction between vision and touch, is in some of
what it proclaims even more problematic than the first one. Parts of
the argument can easily be criticized and refuted on the basis of well-
established facts and stylistic analysis. However, in the intellectual world
of Herder and his time this second distinction was of profound symbolic
significance, and it provides an important insight into the thought of
that formative stage in modern notions of art.

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Herder not only asks what dimensions of reality the different senses
and arts are able to capture; he also wishes to establish and describe
their particular modes of being. He thus distinguishes among three
modes of artistic being, or, as he calls them, three “species of beauty.”
“Parts next to each other result in a surface; one after another are,
most purely and most simply, the tones; parts at one and the same
time, next to each other, one into another, altogether, are bodies or
shapes” (p. 257).'> The distinction, then, is between surface, tone, and
body, or, if you wish, between painting, music (or poetry), and sculp-
ture. These are the borders nature herself has devised, they should not
be transgressed, and the arts rooted in each of the individual modes
should not be confused. “A music that paints, and a painting that
sounds, a sculpture that dyes, and a depiction that wishes to carve in
stone, these are degenerations that will remain without impact or that
will have a false impact” (p. 257).
Now, the art of the surface, painting, is the art of simultaneity, of
“one next to the other.” In making this statement, Herder also makes
the tacit assumption that it is discrete units, well distinguished, that are
placed next to each other on the picture surface. In other words, when
speaking of painting, Herder has a specific style in mind, that which,
following Woelfflin, we would call the “linear style.” In that style, it is
true, outline plays a central part, the components of the composition
are well defined in themselves, sharp boundaries are an essential consti-
tutive element. Needless to say, Herder here disregards style of a
different character.
Sculpture, Herder thinks, works on a model other than that of
painting. Boundaries cannot be sharply defined in the statue: “Sculpture
works [surfaces] into one another” (258). The touching hand cannot
clearly distinguish between adjacent parts, the surfaces are continuously
transformed into one another. In sculpture, Herder says, ‘“‘one is all,
and all are only one” (p. 259).
Herder here comes close to applying to the visual arts a notion that
was to be among his most important contributions to aesthetic thought,
the notion of “organicism.” A work of art, aesthetic organicism as-
sumes, may be compared to a living organism. Though the work
displays a great wealth of subtle distinctions and, in fact, no part is full

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identical with any other, no part of the work can be fully separated
from the rest, no definite limit can be set to it. Herder, it has been
claimed, was the first critic to make use of the concept of organic form
in practical criticism. I think we can take one step further and say that
this is also true of his attitude to the visual arts. Here sculpture is the
full embodiment of organic form. It is an art in which one form or part
is gradually transformed into the other; we cannot indicate the limit
that separates one form from the next. Even where materials of an
altogether different nature are portrayed—for instance, the human
body and the drapery covering it—the distinction between them is
often obscured. Here Herder adduces the Greeks who made dress reveal
rather than hide the shape of the body wearing it, the so-called “wet
drapery” (he uses the term nasse Gewéinder, p. 267), and this particular
device seems to him symbolic of the nature of sculpture in general.

LE AREC ONSTRUCTING ATA EUNTEYAOFRALHEPARTSs

The questions raised by Lessing and Herder, as well as the answers they
provided, clearly illustrate, | hope, one of the central processes that
dominated thought on art in the last third of the eighteenth century.
That process was of crucial consequence for aesthetic reflection in the
two centuries following; we clearly feel its impact in the ideas put
forward and debated in our own day. In the eighteenth century, it was
a process in which the notion of one art—comprising all media of
artistic expression—was broken up into a multitude of individual arts.
The gap between one art and another was widened. The arts were
shown to be of an altogether different structure, rooted in different
dimensions of experience (space, time), and, finally, addressing different
senses. Even when we disregard what the humanists called “poetry”
and concentrate our attention on the mimetic arts in the visual domain,
we still encounter a cleavage, an abyss that seems to remain unbridgea-
ble. Herder showed that painting and sculpture originated in different
areas of human experience and addressed different senses. Could all the
arts still be seen as forming one comprehensive untiy? Was this not the
end of the doctrine claiming that all the arts hang together?

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To artists, writers, and critics around 1800 this conclusion seemed

unacceptable. To be sure, even they knew—as we nowadays know
much better—that from Lessing and Herder, and from the critical
movement they initiated, a great deal could be learned about the
specific nature of each individual art, about the kind of problems
encountered in creating works of poetry and music, sculpture and
painting, and, most important, about our experiencing works of art
carried out in these different media. But what seemed to be the result
of that process—the breaking up of the great organic unity of art into
different techniques—could not be accepted as the final message of a
profound and long-lasting concern with the problem. The individual
arts could not remain altogether separated from each other, isolated
and scattered fragments never again to be connected. The more the
unique character of an individual art became manifest, the more strongly
the need was felt to link it with another, equally unique, art. A way had
to be found to reconstruct an overall unity of the arts. This was the
psychological origin of the great systems of aesthetics that fully domi-
nated the thought of the next generation.
I need not waste many words in convincing the reader that a
renewed putting together of the arts could not possibly mean the re-
storation of the—perhaps naive—belief that all the arts are, in fact,
one and the same creative entity. The lesson taught by the genera-
tion of Lessing and Herder could not be so easily forgotten. The one,
universal great art that the Renaissance bequeathed to ensuing periods
was split into the arts of time and the arts of space; it became obvious
what the arts of space can and cannot do, as the abilities and inabilities
of the arts of time also became manifest. Even within the arts of space
a chasm was opened up between the art that addresses vision and the
art that addresses touch. What had been learned from the Laocoén and
from Plastik could not just be forgotten. If once again the arts were to
be linked to each other, this could not be achieved by obscuring the
borders separating one from the other, or by blurring the distinct
character of each. It was felt that the arts should be linked on the basis
of their very variety; a system of the distinct arts was required.
The age of the great systems that was approaching contained many
attempts to answer these questions. In the following pages I shall

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adduce two such attempts, both from the generation following that of
Lessing and Herder. The systems I propose to survey establish their
theoretical constructions on totally different bases. Nevertheless they
may be linked in presentation: one of them opens the brief period of
intensive search for a system of the arts; the other is the outcome—
many would say, the final result—of these searches and concludes the
creative phase of system building in the theory of the arts.

fT OCHLEEGEIL

Our first document is a series of lectures delivered by the German poet,

critic, and scholar August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) at the Univer-
sity of Jena, preserved mainly in the notes of a gifted student, Friedrich
Ast, who was to become a leading Platonist and aesthetic philosopher
of the early nineteenth century. Though Schlegel’s lectures were pub-
lished under the title Philosophische Kunstlehre (Philosophical Doctrines of
Art), they are in fact devoted mainly to a discussion of poetry and some
other forms of literature. The nonliterary arts play only a minor,
marginal part in Schlegel’s thought. Nevertheless, what he says in the
few pages devoted to the visual arts allows us to detect the outlines of
a system comprising all the arts, a system based on a clear principle. In
the following observations | shall disregard the detailed discussion of
poetry to concentrate on the system as a whole, its principle, and what
it says about the visual arts. Unfortunately, Schlegel nowhere formu-
lated his principle, and | shall therefore have to put it forward in my
own words.
Schlegel wants to establish a “natural history of art.” he By the end
of the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a popular term. It
meant the singling out and recording of the essential stages of a
development. “History” without any further qualifications—to put it
simplistically—means mainly the recording of individual events, and
these, superficially at least, do not seem to follow by necessity from any
underlying structure. “Natural history,” on the other hand, lays bare
fundamental structure, and shows the necessity, or law, by which one
stage follows the other. A “natural history of art,” says Schlegel, cannot
be derived from historical experience only. Experience—that is, the

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consideration of concrete events—can explain only what happens by

chance (p. 8). Natural history is meant to explain what follows of
necessity, the very laws governing the stages of the unfolding of a
process.
It is interesting to note that at this early stage Schlegel seems to have
suggested a methodology that will remind the modern reader of anthro-
pological procedures. ‘What is here called natural history of art,” we
read, may be seen historically, that is, as a succession of stages remem-
bered and narrated, but it may also be seen spread out simultaneously.
There are new peoples, “peoples of child- and at the most youth-age,”
says an early commentator on Schlegel (p. 7 n. 16). Like a good
anthropologist, he believes that what we observe in primitive peoples of
today is an analogy of earlier periods of history.
Schlegel himself says that the concept of a “natural history of art’ is
an “exposition and explanation of the necessary origins of art in the
particular existence and the natural environment of man” (p. 7). Behind
this rather general claim the distinctive nature of Schlegel’s model may
be felt. Let us put this in a modern formulation: The model is man
himself. The original medium of artistic creation is man himself, his
gestures, sounds, and words. The original manifestations of the human
drive to artistic creation are not symbols or arbitrary forms, echoes the
commentator (p. 8, n. 19). Nor was the original work of art thought
out in advance. “The original poems,” Schlegel says, “were inspired by
a real, present emotion.” That emotion, or passion, “was too tempes-
tuous to permit a prudent preparation, and it did not need it” (p. 33).
A crucial note is here struck, a note that was to resound with increasing
force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An important myth of
our modern age begins to stand out against a historical background: the
original artist created the primeval work of art in a kind of trance, in a
paroxysm of overwhelming emotions. The artist begins to be altogether
detached from the workshop tradition; as with premeditation, the
“work” thus created literally need not go beyond the artist himself.
“All the arts the instruments of which are external to man suppose
physical observation and an arbitrary act of evaluation” (p. 9). Here, in
these fragmentary remarks, a system of the arts is foreshadowed. Man
is not only the producer of art, he is also—to a certain, changing

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extent—the medium in which the work is carried out. The closer an

art is to man—so it follows—the more authentic it is; the further
removed from man—his body, his voice, his movements—the more
artificial, the less primeval it is. Schlegel is of course aware that even
the most authentic arts cannot do without some elements of arbitrary
shaping. Thus he knows that the human voice is put to threefold use:
shouting, singing, speaking. Shouting is fully instinctive, it lacks arbitrar-
iness. Singing, however, would not be what it is without an arbitrary
structuring of the sounds produced by man. Speaking, finally, is an
activity employing symbols and conventions. Take away the symbolic
and conventional features from language, and there will be no speech.
The visual arts, as we have just said, played only a marginal part in
Schlegel’s thought. Yet what he says in the few pages devoted to this
subject is often unexpected and anticipates certain notions that have
achieved broad popularity in the modern world. I shall disregard Schle-
gel’s interesting discussion of whether or not architecture belongs to
the visual arts (pp. 227-233), and shall concentrate only on what he has
to say about painting and sculpture. His views are worth consideration
not only because they are crucial to the emergence of modern aesthetics
but also for what they contribute to present-day discussions.
Painting and sculpture are of course conceived as having a great deal
in common, and the great masters of the Renaissance, as Schlegel points
out, have shown this in practice. But to his way of thinking, sculpture
occupies a more important place. Sculpture, in his definition, is the art
that creates “forms and figures that can be viewed from all sides, that
do not appear singly” (p. 238). In other words, sculpture is the art that
shapes three-dimensional bodies. One perceives the echo of Herder’s
doctrine when one reads that in a statue the borders of the planes are
fluid, that surfaces cannot be sharply defined. To know a statue you
must undertake a long process of experiencing it. This idea may be
behind Schlegel’s claim—at first glance surprising—that sculpture
“eternalizes movement” (p. 239).
The “forms and figures” produced by the sculptor can be of different
types. Schlegel anticipates twentieth-century thought when he says that
the forms shaped by the sculptor can be either “organic” or “mathe-
matical” (pp. 233-234). When “organic” forms are produced, the

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model is taken from the world of living bodies. Greek sculpture has
shown what the organic body can mean to the artist, both as a direct
model to be imitated and as a comprehensive principle. The living body
dominates Greek art in all its manifestations. Even lifeless matter is
informed by the organic principle. When the Greek artist shows draped
figures, the folds of the cloth follow the organic forms of the body and
manifest, rather than obscure, its structure. Even heavy stuff becomes a
carrier of the organic spirit pervading Greek art.
The other type of form into which three-dimensional objects may be
cast Schlegel calls “mathematical.”” Once again, the student cannot but
regret that our author nowhere defined what he meant by that term.
Carefully reading the rather few and brief observations he makes on the
subject, one cannot help concluding that he did not have precisely
mathematics in mind. What he calls “mathematical” we would probably
term “‘abstract.”” Mathematical forms are set apart from all other forms
by their origin: they are not derived from regular experience, they are
not collected from the outside world. It is their signature that man
himself—more specifically, his mind—is their origin. It is characteris-
tic of the mathematical form that “the model is taken purely from the
human mind.” We speak here of “regular forms the human mind itself
constructs” (p. 234). To be sure, Schlegel also has something to say
about the character of the forms themselves. They are straight and
angular and “manifest expediency.” A modern reader, used to the
present-day vocabulary of artistic terms, would immediately think of
‘“functional.”” No wonder, then, that mathematical forms can best be
observed in tools. It is in tools that both the expediency and the
calculability of mathematical forms is most obvious. But in following
Schlegel’s thought one can see, I believe, that the major characteristic
of mathematical forms is not the character of the actual forms (angular-
ity, calculability, expediency) but rather their origin in the mind alone.
In juxtaposing organic and mathematical forms, Schlegel wants to
map out the essential possibilities, or options, facing the artist. Using
the language of late eighteenth-century German philosophy, we should
say that he is constructing a system. But in fact he also used this
juxtaposition of forms taken from external nature and others originating
purely in the mind in order to detect and outline the direction of a

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historical development. Once more, he makes only a brief observation,

but it is one that is well worth our careful attention, particularly in the
light of recent discussions.
Schlegel is concerned with discussing, in most general terms, the
direction in which Greek sculpture unfolded. He accepts the three-
stage model of this development that, we are accustomed to describing
by the terms “archaic,” ry 66 “classical,” and “late” or Hellenistic. “Greek
sculpture,” Schlegel observes, “went the great systematic course” (p.
238). What is the characteristic of the art of the early stage, the one we
call ‘archaic’? The humanistic tradition, which still held sway in Schle-
gel’s time, knew little of archaic art. Winckelmann explicitly tells his
readers”? that he had never seen any piece of sculpture produced at
this early age. The humanists’ attitude to the archaic age was one of
principle, and it was based on the model of growth and decay. An old
tradition had it that the feature characterizing the initial stages of the
great historical process is the inability of art to do full justice to nature
when portraying it. “The arts,” says Vasari, started from “modest
beginnings, improving them little by little, until they finally perfected
them.”?! Schlegel suggests an altogether different attitude. “Greek
sculpture,” he says, “did not begin with a slavish imitation of nature,
but instantly grasped the idea of a human form, carrying it out with
great severity, according to rule and systematically in the highest
degree” (p. 238). Art does not begin with an observation of nature, and
archaic art is not like the child’s fumbling while he is assembling details
and fragmentary pieces of reality that eventually, in a distant future,
will fall into a pattern. Whether or not this model of child development
is correct, it cannot be used for understanding the history of art. On
the contrary, says Schlegel, what art begins with is a rather abstract
pattern, clearly and sharply present in the artist’s mind. The early Greek
sculptor, who carried this image in his mind, also had the ability —the
acuteness of vision as well as the manual dexterity —to carry it out in
hard stone.
The second stage of that development, that is, so-called “high classi-
cal” art, is conceived as a union of the severity and loftiness of archaic
art and “‘the charms of life” (p. 239). In this period, the images of the
gods and the heroes were the main concern of the artists. Schlegel

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describes the expressive qualities of these images when he speaks of

“calm divinity,” and says that “circumspection, self-assuredness” were
characteristic of them.
Of the last period Schlegel has very little to say; we don’t even know
whether he had Hellenistic or Roman art in mind. We learn only that
this was a period of decline, and that the specific art form it created
was the portrait: “only late,” says Schlegel in his lectures, “art conde-
scended to the portrait, the beginning of its downfall.” (p. 239).

2 HEGEE

The process I am trying to outline in this chapter—the combining of

the distinct arts into a comprehensive system—reached a climax with
the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-
1831). Hegel is a hurdle equally difficult to take or to evade. In many
fields of thought and reflection, his mark on the life of the modern
mind is inescapable. This, I believe, is also true with regard to the visual
arts. Perhaps the most striking proof of Hegel’s “relevance,” to use the
contemporary cant expression, is the debate over the truth or falsity of
his views. The ideological shrillness of the polemics surrounding Hegel’s
theory is the best indication that he touches a nerve in modern life. In
recent decades, the argument has been particularly intense. Some stu-
dents of visual images have undertaken to expose the weaknesses in
Hegel’s doctrine and to point out the dangers behind it, thus again
demonstrating how topical his thought remains,-and to what an extent
present-day reflection cannot avoid having to come to terms with it.
But Hegel’s significance for our subject is often also directly acknowl-
edged. Recently, Ernst Gombrich, who has contributed his fair share of
Hegel criticism to the literature on art, even declared that Hegel rather
than Winckelmann “should be called the father of art history.” **
In Hegel’s system, it is by now notorious, no single part can be
detached from the whole doctrine and discussed separately. Neverthe-
less, I shall attempt to limit my observations to one subject only, namely
the visual arts. Moreover, | shall emphasize one aspect of that subject:
how Hegel conceives the relationship between one art and the other. It

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is the system of the arts with which we shall here be concerned. Our
main source will be the Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik (translated into
English as Aesthetics: Philosophy of Fine Art apes though in Hegel’s case, even
more so than with other thinkers, his entire oeuvre should be taken
into account. The Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik (Lectures on Aesthetics)
were delivered four times at the University of Berlin (between 1820 and
1830). They are known to us through the reconstruction made by
Hegel’s devoted disciple Hotho, who used the philosopher’s own lecture
notes together with notes taken by some of the students who attended
the courses. This origin of the text makes us somewhat hesitant to place
crucial emphasis on any single formulation. On the whole, however, the
text bears the stamp of indisputable authenticity.
What does Hegel have to say to the student of art theory and its
history? Nobody familiar with Hegel’s thought will be surprised to find
that, here as in so many other fields of reflection, the answer cannot be
easily given. While there is little in his system that explicitly and
directly pertains to art theory in the traditional sense of that term, most
of what he says has an indirect yet essential bearing on our subject.
In a study of theories of art, one of the most important features of
Hegel’s Aesthetics must be emphasized: it is devoted exclusively to a
philosophy of art, and in this respect it is probably the first work of its
kind. Hegel begins his lectures by a critique of the term “aesthetics.”
As we remember, A. G. Baumgarten gave the first volume expounding
his doctrine the title Aesthetica (1750), but what he had in mind had little
to do with art. What Baumgarten in fact tried to propound was a
theory of perception, and for the notion of “perception” he employed
the Greek term aisthenastai (to recognize, perceive). Were we to take the
term literally, it would be altogether unsuitable for what Hegel has in
mind. He uses it because it has become customary. Another term has
been suggested, he remarks, “Kallistics” (derived from the Greek kallos
= beautiful). This term, too, is inappropriate, and Hegel’s rejection of
it is of importance in our context. The subject matter of his theory is
not the Beautiful as such. What he is concerned with is Art. His
“Aesthetics” is, as he explicitly says, a philosophy of art, or, in his
words, a philosophy of fine arts. He therefore excludes the beauty of

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nature from his consideration. The beauty of art is a beauty “born of

the spirit.” The work of art, he says later, is not a product of nature,
but of human activity; it is produced for man; and it has its goal within
itself. 7*
Concentrating on art as a human activity, on the work of art as a
man-made object, is essential, but it is not sufficient. In actual life,
works of art often fulfill different functions. They may serve to decorate
our environment, they may be intended to provide us with pleasure. In
performing these functions, art is not what Hegel has in mind; it is not
“free art,” it does not bear its purpose in itself. Such declarations
should not mislead us into reckoning Hegel among the philosophers of
“Part pour lart,” of “art for art’s sake.” He is not a thinker who
considers art a self-enclosed domain. It is Hegel’s basic assumption—
one that follows from the central ideas of his philosophical system as a
whole—that art and religion have the same essential substance and
subject matter; they differ from each other only in form. Art, he says,
“has first of all to make the Divine the focus of its representations.” ”°
Art is free, and it is altogether true art only when it fully devotes itself
to this supreme task, the articulation of the Divine. It is precisely
because art is concerned with the most basic issues of man that different
nations have embodied their most substantial intuitions and mental
views in works of art.*°
The great religions themselves, Hegel was fully aware, have not
always acknowledged their kinship with art. Some of the great faiths
openly display hostility to artistic endeavor and artistic production.
Judaism and Islam are, of course, the best-known examples of such an
attitude, but Hegel also mentions the iconoclastic movement that shook
the foundations of Eastern Christendom, and the Protestant hostility to
images that impressed itself on the culture and thought of the modern
West. In spite of these weighty, sometimes even violent, rejections of
art by certain religions, Hegel does not doubt that within religion as
such the basis for images is to be found.
To be sure, “the Divine, explicitly regarded as unity and universality,
is essentially present only to thinking and, as in itself imageless, is not
susceptible of being imaged and shaped by imagination.” Yet he con-
tinues:

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Nevertheless, on the other hand, however far unity and universality are the
characteristics of the Divine, the Divine nevertheless is essentially determinate
in itself, and since it therefore disencumbers itself of abstractness, it resigns
itself to pictorial representation and visualization. If now it is seized in its
determinate form and displayed pictorially by imagination, there at once enters
a multiplicity of determinations, and here alone is the beginning of the proper
sphere of ideal art. a

What is the meaning of this statement? Let us disregard the meta-

physical terminology and instead look for the thought behind its strange
and possibly obscure wording. What is of significance for our present
purpose is, first, that art is not merely some kind of decoration, but
rather follows from the innermost structure and life of the Divine.
Second, and more important for the modern student, is the location of
art in Hegel’s intellectual chart. Art, and particularly the image, dwell
in the domain of tension that extends between the pure notion, neces-
sarily devoid of any image and material realization, and the objectifica-
tion of the idea in material substance and sensory experience.
We encounter here the symbol as the central problem of Hegel’s
thought on art. Throughout the Aesthetics, he deals with symbol and
symbolism, whether or not he uses these particular terms. Disregarding
his terminology, we can say that he considers art as a whole as
symbolism. The symbol is the mediation between the invisible and
visible, mind and matter. Beauty is symbolic. Hegel’s famous definition
of the beautiful as “the sensory appearance [or manifestation] of the
idea” —‘“‘das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee”—could be translated by the
statement: the beautiful is symbolic. So is art. In the Introduction to
the Aesthetics, where he first suggests the idea of “free art,” he paints a
metaphysical canvas of how the Spirit, breaking apart thought and
matter in its unfolding, is able to heal the breach. “It generates out of
itself works of fine art as the first reconciling middle term between
pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient,
between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual
thinking.” ** There is an intrinsic affinity between the two halves in the
work of art. In the chapter on symbolic art to which we shall presently
return, Hegel says that the symbol is also a sign (“das Symbol is
zunachst ein Zeichen”) and then goes on to distinguish between the

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symbolic and semiotic functions. There is no doubt as to where in this

dichotomy art is situated: “When symbol is taken as a mere sign with
such an indifference between meaning and its expression, we may not
take account of it in reference to art, since art as such consists precisely
in the kinship, relation, and concrete interpenetration of meaning and
shape.””?
The second part of the Aesthetics is called “Development of the Ideal
into Particular Forms of Art,”’ a title that in itself indicates the historical
bent of the philosopher’s thought. In Hegel’s monumental work, how-
ever, we are not faced with a regular history of the arts, not even of
the Winckelmannian type. Hegel tries to discover meanings within the
unfolding historical process itself. The process is not simply recorded, it
is interpreted. The fundamental conceptual structure within which this
interpretation is carried out is made up of the three major art forms
that correspond to the three stages of the historical unfolding of the
arts. Hegel calls these three art forms “symbolic,” 7 66 “classic,” and “‘ro-
mantic.” The doctrine of the art forms—both as a comprehensive
principle for patterning the history of the arts, and in the specific
characterization of each individual “form” —may well prove to be his
most interesting and lasting contribution to the theory of the arts,
particularly of the visual arts. In the following observations, | shall be
concerned with the art forms only.
At first, the theory of the art forms seems a dramatic departure from
the traditional attitudes to studying art, a true revolution in artistic
reflection. When considered in the full articulation and systematic shape
it assumes in the Aesthetics, the doctrine may indeed approach the
revolutionary. Yet in building up this theory, Hegel was drawing on
several intellectual traditions, mainly art theories current in his time. A
glance at his sources, at the historical context of the Aesthetik, may help
us to better understand what he says about the art forms themselves.
The categories of the classical and the modern, or post-classical
(what Hegel calls “romantic”), are of course well known from that
long-standing debate the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, which played
such an important part in the intellectual life of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. As we have seen,” in late seventeenth-century
France, the Querelle was a central topic in theories of painting. In late

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eighteenth-century Germany it was less significant for reflection on the

visual arts, but it played a major part in theories of literature. Some of
the most important minds of that period, among them Lessing and
Schiller, took part in the attempts to describe the meaning and charac-
ter of “ancient” and “modern.”?! This polarity, then, belonged to the
familiar intellectual coinages of the time.
In Hegel’s thought, however, the dualism is transformed into a
tripartite system; to the polarity of ancient and modern (“romantic”),
he adds an initial category, or stage, the pre-classical. He calls this the
“symbolic” art form. This category seems altogether new, but closer
inspection shows that even here Hegel was not creating something out
of nothing. Though the origins of the concept “symbolic art form” are
not as obvious as those of the two other art forms, they are present.
We shall not, of course, here trace those origins in full (in the chapter
on Symbolism we shall have to make some observations on the subject),
we shall only briefly indicate some major contexts.
Hegel accepts Winckelmann’s characterization of Greek antiquity as
a climax of artistic development. Greek art was an instant—never to
recur—in which the ideal attained full realization. But precisely be-
cause Greek art is so perfect, it cannot, in our philosopher’s view, be
the beginning of the historical process. Greek art was not miraculously
given as a divine revelation, complete and perfect from the very first
moment of its appearance. It emerged in a process, there must have
been preceding stages. Those early periods are combined into the
concept of the “symbolic” stage or art form.
The generation of Hegel’s teachers was attracted by the treasures
and mysteries of the ancient East. Thus Herder was profoundly inter-
ested in pre-Greek, Oriental art and mythology. His studies of biblical
poetry quickly became famous. In his great work, Contributions to the
Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784—- 1791), *- he devotes an extended
discussion to the cultures of the Far East (Book XI) and the Near East
(XII). Friedrich Creuzer, to whom we shall revert in the next chapter,
tried to decode the mythologies of pre-Greek cultures.>?The Indologi-
cal researches of Friedrich Schlegel * left their mark on the nineteenth-
century picture of world culture.
I have mentioned only some of the most prominent essays pertinent

183
 Modern Theories of Art

to our present theme. They show that since the last decades of the
eighteenth century, German poets, thinkers, and students had become
increasingly aware of the pre-Greek world, of its rich cultures and their
significance for an understanding of “world art.” It is interesting to
note, however, that these considerations of early cultures were not
made in the context of, or in relation to, the ‘ ‘querelle” between the
ancients and the moderns. It was Hegel who saw the three great
phenomena—pre-Greek cultures, Greek art and civilization, and the
modern world—as interrelated, and in so doing he initiated the tripar-
tite system of his view of art. It is also worth noting that the German
students and poets who were fascinated with the pre-Greek cultures
mainly knew texts; what they had in mind were verbal, literary expres-
sions. To Hegel, by contrast, the visual arts were the media by which
the central expressions of these cultures were transmitted.
After these few observations on the cultural context of Hegel’s
system of the arts, let us now turn to what he says about those art
forms themselves.

The Symbolic Art Form. Symballein (ovwBadXeEv), the origin of our

“symbol,” the dictionary tells us, initially meant to throw together, to
bring together. However, it was Hegel’s view, as well as Schelling’s,
that in the symbol the infinite and the finite, the idea and the form,
never completely coalesce. Every symbol, then, contains a tension that
has not been fully dissolved. In his not very simple language, Hegel says:

Symbol is an external existent given or immediately present to contemplation,

which yet is to be understood not simply as it confronts us immediately on its
own account, but in a wider and more universal sense. Thus at once there are
two distinctions to make in the symbol: (i) the meaning, and (ii) the expression
thereof. The first is an idea or topic, no matter what its content, the second is
a sensuous existent or a picture of some kind or other.*°

Because the two parts of the symbol—the meaning symbolized and

the object or shape symbolizing that meaning—do not completely
overlap or merge, there remains a tension in the relations between
them. Shape and meaning are not necessarily altogether external to
each other; their connection is not necessarily an arbitrary one, but a

184
Illustrations
The Fate of the Artist, a late eighteenth-century engraving, shows the artist
(and his work) approached by the shining figures of reason, including a
Minerva, and by dark grotesque figures with beasts’ heads. Author’s
photograph.
Gérard de Lairesse, Detail of a Model Sheet, reproduced in the Grand livre.
Though drawing from nature was considered the artist’s highest
achievement, the copying of model sheets, customary in workshops
since the late Middle Ages, continued to be practiced. Author’s photo-
graph.
Mengs’s Parnassus, painted in 1760~1761 on the ceiling of the Gallery in
the Villa Albani, Rome, is the pictorial proclamation of academic
classicism, borrowing subject matter and formal motifs from Antiquity
and transforming them into Neoclassical images. Author’s photograph.
Jacques Louis David, The Sabines, 1799, Louvre, Paris. In representing
this dramatic story David manages to indicate the understanding of, and
high regard for, archaic art that at the turn of the century was beginning
to emerge on the cultural horizon. Permission Musées Nationaux,
France.
Raphael, Sistine Madonna, 1515, Dresden. The Sistine Madonna appeared
to Winckelmann as the perfect imitation of the Greek Ideal; in her face
and figure he discovered the noble tranquillity he believed to be
characteristic of the ancient images of the gods. Permission Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
Venus Medici (detail), Florence, Uffizi. Carried away to Paris in 1802 and
returned to Florence in 1816, this famous statue, considered at the time
an embodiment of female beauty, exerted a profound influence on
nineteenth-century sculpture and theory of art. Author’s photograph.
Apollo Belvedere, Rome. For generations the Apollo Belvedere was the
ultimate example showing art overcoming nature. The statue served
both as an ideal to be sought after and as a yardstick for judging the
value of recent works of art. Author’s photograph.
Laocoén, Rome. Perhaps no other work of ancient art was as influential,
both on artists and on writers on art. In the Enlightenment the Laocodn
gave rise to a crucial conflict of interpretations, best known in the clash
between Winckelmann’s and Lessing’s views of what the visual arts can,
or cannot, achieve. Author’s photograph.
J. B. C. Chardin, The Smoker’s Kit, 1737(?), Louvre, Paris. Detached from
noble literary connotations, modern still life could proclaim a program:
by accepting insignificant objects as the main subject matter of pictures
critics could be led to admit that the values of painting are not
necessarily those of content. Permission Musées Nationaux, France.

(Left)
.
Correggio,
(>
Jupiter and lo, ca. 1532, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna. Artists, critics, and philosophers between the middle of the
eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries were
Cc
fascinated
by Correggio’s evocative power, and referred to this painting as an
example of the impact of art on the beholder. Permission Kunsthisto-
risches Museum, Vienna.
J. B. Greuze, The Village Bride, exhibited in the Salon of 1761 (now in the
Louvre, Paris). Painted in the same year as Mengs’s idealized vision of
the Parnassus, Greuze’s everyday-life image of a family occasion cele-
brates marriage as a social institution of contemporary life. Author’s
photograph.
 Bae Sees

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849. Formerly State Picture Gal-
lery, Dresden. An embodiment of programmatic realism, the picture
elevates everyday hgures to a monumental level. The socialist Proudhon,
Courbet’s friend and detender, likened the painting to a parable from
the Gospels. Author’s photograph.
Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1786-1787, Sta-
delsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main. Goethe’s sojourn in Italy
marks a turning point in his intellectual development, and is expressed
by the painter who portrayed him. Preserving the antiquarian’s faithful-
ness to details (we can identify the tomb of Cecilia Metella in the
background), the painting becomes an image of meditation upon a lost
classical past. Permission Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.
Drawing by Charles Baudelaire, private collection. Inscribed in Baude-
laire’s hand: “Specimen of Antique Beauty, dedicated to Chenavard.”
Chenavard was a classicistic academic painter, and Baudelaire’s inscrip-
tion clearly carries a satirical undertone. Author’s photograph.
Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio (detail), 1854-1855, Louvre, Paris.
In a letter to Champfleury (January 1855) Courbet explained this as-
then-unfinished painting and his ideas on art in general. Reality includes
both everyday scenes and allegories. Permission Musées Nationaux,
France.
Caspar David Friedrich, Winter, 1808, formerly Munich (destroyed 1931).
That decay and death are the universal fate of every creature and have
cosmic validity is best expressed by means of landscape: the decaying
ruin, the tree stripped of foliage, and the old man merge into one
“natural symbol.” Permission Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlung,
Munich.
A. L. Richter, The Passage at the Stone of Terror, ca. 1837, Dresden. People
of different ages traveling on a small boat may suggest the old theme of
the passage of life. The boat, one notes, travels into the darkness of
evening, making a symbolic statement about nature and the natural
cycle of time. Author’s photograph.
J. A. D. Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827, Louvre, Paris. Against the
backdrop of an Ionic temple, a hierarchy of great artists throughout the
ages is topped by the figure of Homer, the inward-looking poet. In this
painting Ingres made a powerful pictorial statement concerning the
artist and the immutable aesthetic authority of classical Greece. Permis-
sion Musées Nationaux, France.
J. A. D. Ingres, The Dream of Ossian, drawing, Louvre, Paris. The Ossianic
poems, at the time believed to be genuine records of Nordic mythology,
provided Ingres with themes of dreams and visions. Permission Musées
Nationaux, France.
Henry Fuseli, Artist Despairing at the Greatness of Ancient Remains, drawing,
1778-1780, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Fuseli sharply criticized academic clas-
sicism. In this drawing the rebellious Fuseli created a striking admission
of the indestructible greatness of Antiquity as an expression of his own
loneliness. Courtesy Kunsthaus, Zurich.
 Re

J. A. D. Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina, 1814, Fogg Art Museum,

Cambridge, Mass. The cult of Raphael becomes a eulogy of the creative
artist. Permission Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Mass. Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.
Louis Hercole Sisco (after L. C. A. Steinheil), Diirer Followed by Demons,
1840, illustration for Victor Hugo’s Les voix intérieurs. Diirer is pictured
as a lonely rambler in the depth of a horrible forest, haunted by
fantastic, frightening demons. The artist as a martyr, suffering from
hallucinations, became one of the major types in the imagination of the
period. Author’s photograph.
Eugéne Delacroix, Michelangelo in His Studio, 1850, Musée Fabre, Mont-
pellier. An example of the Michelangelo veneration so characteristic of
romantic thought, the painting also attests to the conception that the
artist who created the titanic figures was himself an introspective figure.
Author’s photograph.
Eugéne Delacroix, Tasso in the Madhouse, 1839, Collection Oskar Reinhart,
Winterthur, Switzerland. The artist’s, and the poet’s, link with insanity
was an old motif. Delacroix here combines the traditional imagery of
melancholy contemplation (resting the head on the hand) with the more
modern institution for the detention of the insane. Courtesy Collection
Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur, Switzerland.
Eugéne Delacroix, Paganini, 1831, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Probably painted shortly after Delacroix attended Paganini’s first con-
cert in Paris, the painting documents Delacroix’s fascination both with
the images of the artist and with other arts, especially music. Permission
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Eugéne Delacroix, Chopin, drawing, private collection. Delacroix rarely
painted portraits on commission; his finest examples are of his friends.
In Chopin’s image he combined features of the conquering hero and of
the disturbed madman; it is a statement about the genius consumed by
his own fire. Author’s photograph.
Charles Meryon, Le Stryge, Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. Nineteenth-
century restoration of medieval monuments, particularly in France,
brought about a unique mixture of medieval motifs and modern inter-
pretations, such as the many visions of demons. Author’s photograph.
Medieval grotesque figures appealed to the taste of Champfleury. A
piece of late medieval woodcarving he saw in the palace of justice in
Rouen showed him how powerful and primeval was the figure of the
juggler in medieval imagination. Author’s photograph.
The cathedral of Rouen, Champfleury discovered, abounds in images
depicting composite creatures. It is the incongruence of the clumsy
bestial head and the delicate human hand that reveals the nature of the
grotesque. Author’s photograph.
“A hooded figure with the head and body of a pig, playing a musical
instrument (the old woman with the fiddlestick)”—in these words
Champfleury described one of the grotesque figures he saw in the
cathedral of Rouen. Author’s photograph.
 by. . A
KC ~My
if
(ian itu N
maimg jnWe .
wh

A grotesque image from the cathedral of Rouen, used as an illustration

by Champfleury. The distorted and deformed mirror the Middle Ages
seemed to hold up to humanity was endowed with a mysterious power
of expression and exercised an aesthetic fascination over the modern
spectator. Author’s photograph.
 Unity and Diversity of the Visual Arts

certain alienation cannot be overcome. Were this otherwise, the object

or shape we take as a symbol would be an image of the meaning, not a
symbol.
Hegel now turns to an internal history of the symbolic art form. In
the earliest stages of culture, men directly endowed with meaning
certain material objects or phenomena they found or observed. They
were not aware of the incongruence of what they encountered in
sensory experience and the meanings they attributed to it. The ancient
Persians, for example, worshiped light as such; the sun itself, they
believed, was God. This is a presymbolic stage of consciousness. It
follows from Hegel’s reasoning, though he does not say so explicitly,
that at this stage no great art can emerge. The artistic image requires a
certain distance between the object represented, or the meaning re-
ferred to, and the representation itself. So long as the spiritual and the
material are not sundered, there is no room for art.
Even at this stage, however, it dawns upon man that the Divine is
more than the natural object considered as the god. Indian art reflects
the initial expressions of this early awareness. On the one hand, the
Divine was detached from all material links; God was conceived as the
absolute infinite, as “nothingness.” But nothingness, however lofty it
may be, cannot be captured by the artist; thus Indian art took refuge in
the most luxuriant sensuality. “In order, as sensuous figures themselves,
to reach universality, the individual figures are wildly tugged apart from
one another into the colossal and grotesque.” 26
Actual symbolism begins in Egypt; here we find a full elaboration of
the symbolic art form. “Egypt is the country of symbols,” Hegel says,
“the country which sets itself the spiritual task of the self-deciphering
of the spirit, without actually attaining to the decipherment.” *’ Sym-
bolism could emerge here because in Egyptian culture and imagination
the immediate unity of object and idea was shattered. In their religious
practices the Egyptians did not project divine dignity onto real natural
objects, nor did they consider actual creatures as themselves gods. The
Egyptians, Hegel stressed, required that there be a definite correspon-
dence, a congruence, between the meaning invested in an object and
the object as such. The very demand for congruence implies that, in
reality itself, a certain incongruence prevails between nature and spirit.

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 Modern Theories of Art

The ‘Age of Egypt,” as Hegel calls it, was caught up in a conflict: on

the one hand, it sensed the contrast between nature and spirit, and on
the other, it wished to make the spiritual manifest in the natural and
material. Here, he believes, is the origin of the visual arts.
Only when the inward being becomes free and yet preserves the
impulse to picture to itself, in a real shape, what its essence is, and to
have this very picture before itself also as an external work, only then
does the impulse towards art, especially towards the visual arts, prop-
erly begin. **
In order to make the spiritual manifest in a material object, one
cannot simply take what one finds (vorfinden) in nature. To make the
material object transparent, as it were, so that the inward, the spiritual,
can shine through, one has to invent (erfinden) that object. Symbols—
that is, objects or shapes suggesting the Spirit, the Divine, the Infinite,
and so on—have to be “produced,” “made,” “invented.”*? It was in
Egypt that man made this discovery, and therefore Egypt is the country
of the symbol.
Both Egyptian religion and Egyptian art are dominated—to use
Hegel’s metaphysical wording, so hard to translate into ordinary speech
— by the spirit’s striving for self-understanding, by man’s endeavor to
decode his own mystery. Usually man tries to understand himself by
thinking, the Egyptians did so by building. They erected the huge cities
of the dead, they built the pyramids, they shaped the sphinxes. In all
these works, mute and veiled in mystery as they are, one senses the
powerful drive towards self-understanding.
I shall conclude this brief survey of the “symbolic art form” with
two of Hegel’s observations on Egyptian art. The first concerns the
image of the human figure. Hegel must have been among the earliest
authors to attempt to place the Egyptian rendering of the human body
between what he conceived as pre-Egyptian and Greek representations.
In contradistinction to Indian art, where the human figure is either
grotesquely sensual or a mere personification of an abstract idea, in
Egyptian art the image of the human body acquires a certain autonomy.
The human form, he says, “acquires a quite different formation and
therefore already reveals the struggle to rise upward to the inner and
spiritual life. .. .” But Egyptian art has not yet reached the stage where

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 Unity and Diversity of the Visual Arts

the human body can be the mirror of the spirit. “The shapes remain
colossal, serious, petrified; legs without freedom and serene distinctness,
arms and head closely and firmly affixed to the rest of the body, without
grace and living movement.””*?
This particular stage of consciousness, as reflected in images of the
human body, is expressed in some legendary works of art. Hegel refers
to certain statues, known to him from Greek or Latin literature.
“Especially remarkable,” he says, “are those colossal statues of Memnon
which, resting in themselves, motionless, the arms glued to the body,
the feet firmly fixed together, numb, stiff, and lifeless, are set up facing
the sun in order to await its ray to touch them and give them soul and
sound.” When the rays of the sun touch the statues, so the legend
went, they automatically emitted a sound. This story seems to Hegel
symbolic. That the colossi must await the sun’s rays to produce a sound
shows “that they do not have the spiritual soul freely in themselves.”
There is a soul in the human body, “‘but the inner life of the soul is still
dumb in Egypt and in its animation it is only a natural factor that is
kept in view.’”*!
Hegel concludes his discourse on Egyptian art with an interpreta-
tion of the Sphinx. No other work, or motif, in Egyptian art expresses
the struggle between matter and mind more forcefully than does the
Sphinx. This unique work is, in his own words, “the symbol of the
symbolic.” *” From the dull power of that tremendous mass of the
resting, passive beast the human frame, the proper seat of the spirit,
gropes to emerge, and to come into its own. Not for nothing did Greek
mythology picture the Sphinx as a monster posing riddles. The solution
to the Sphinx’s riddle was to be given by the Greek mind.

The Classical Art Form. Can the life of the spirit be perceived in sensory
experience? There is only one form that can make this possible—the
human body. The human figure, Hegel believes, is the single medium
through which the spirit can shine. He proposes a metaphysical expla-
nation for this state of affairs. ““The center of art is a unification, self-
enclosed so as to be a free totality, a unification of the content with its
entirely adequate shape.”*? In other words, there is one theme in which

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meaning and shape fully overlap. This theme is the human figure, and it
formed the very essence of Greek art.
The complete overlapping of content and form, of meaning and
shape, cannot be attained immediately. Nor can it form the starting
point of history. “The first point to which we must direct our atten-
tion,” says Hegel, “is this, that the classical art-form is not to be
regarded, as the symbolic, as the direct commencement of beginning of
art, but on the contrary as a result. 4 Not only is the classical art form
preceded by the symbolic; it also has an internal history of its own.
Classical art begins with the overcoming of the merely natural. First
comes the deposition of the animal. In this respect, the Greeks distin-
guished themselves from Asiatic and Egyptian cultures. Orientals be-
lieved that the Divine was revealed to them in animal form. Thus, in
India hospitals were built for aging cows and apes, while human beings
were left to starve at the road side; in Egypt, the sacred beasts were
preserved for eternity by embalmment. The Greeks overcame this
reverence for the beast, and made the undoing of the animal the content
of religious ideas and of works of art. Hegel here gives an interpretation
of Greek iconography that is well worth the modern student’s attention.
The representation of animal sacrifice plays a major part in the artistic
repertoire. The subduing and slaying of the wild beast is glorified, it is
considered a heroic deed, and it is represented many times in all media.
Finally, transformation into a beast is considered a severe punishment.
In all these respects, the Greeks are fully opposed to Orientals and
Egyptians.
Another—and in Hegel’s view, a higher—stage of overcoming the
merely natural is mirrored in the struggle between the old and the new
gods of which Greek mythology tells us. The old gods were merely
nature gods, the appearance of brute natural forces; the new gods
appeared as spiritual creatures. The myth of the overthrow of the giants
by the new gods reflects the Greeks’ substitution of a more rational
ethos for one that glorified sheer might as right.
Yet though mere nature, is overcome in this battle, a natural element
is retained in the Greek gods. But that residual of nature is transformed.
To give but one example, in Poseidon “lies the might of the sea that
streams around the earth, but his power and activity stretches further:

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he built Troy and was a safeguard of Athens; in general he was

worshipped as the founder of cities, because the sea is the element for
shipping, trade, and the bond between men.”’*°
The degradation of the beast, the fall of the Titans, the overcoming
of the merely natural gods and their transformation into spiritual beings
—all this converges to reveal, in direct sensory experience, the classical
ideal, the embodiment of a perfect balance between nature and spirit.
This brings us back to the starting point of the classical art form, the
human body.

The Romantic Art Form. The third art form is the “romantic.” It goes
without saying that the meaning of “romantic” as Hegel employs it
differs radically from what we are accustomed to designate by this term
today. When using Romantic or Romanticism as historical terms, we
have a few decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
in mind. In Hegel’s usage, the term has an incomparably broader scope:
it denotes the whole postclassical world. The romantic art form thus
includes several historical periods and several artistic styles. The classical
art form was the product of one nation (the Greeks) only, and of one,
comparatively brief, period. As against such homogeneity, the romantic
art form, like the symbolic, comprises different historical stages and
artistic styles. Hegel distinguishes, of course, between the different
periods (Middle Ages, Reformation, modern times) that he lumps to-
gether in the comprehensive notion of “romantic art form.” He is also
aware of the differences between the styles he includes in that category.
He does not forget how far removed a Byzantine image of the virgin, or
a Raphael Madonna, is from, say, the “merry-making of peasants” in a
Dutch genre piece. *° That his notion of “art form”’ differs from that of
style or period becomes here almost tangibly obvious. What then, one
asks, do these different periods and styles have in common that makes
it possible for Hegel to bring them together into the one art form?
The answer seems obvious: “romantic” is the art of the Christian
world. That Hegel casts all the styles and periods of Christian art into
one comprehensive “form” should not surprise us. The Divine, we
remember, is the supreme subject of all art; the periods and styles of
the history of art are therefore ultimately determined by the nature and

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image of the god who is worshiped in the age. In seeing the whole of
European art as, in the last analysis, shaped by Christian ideas, beliefs,
and images, Hegel reveals how close he is to what the romantics in our
modern sense actually thought. *”
Hegel interprets the formation of Christian art in metaphysical terms.
What he says here reads almost like the description of a cosmic process.
“There is something higher than the beautiful appearance of the spirit
in its immediate sensuous shape,” we are told at the beginning of the
lectures on the romantic art form, “even if this shape be created by the
spirit as adequate to itself.” As history unfolds, the perfect “reconcilia-
tion” between spirit and form is found wanting. The spirit “is pushed
back into itself out of its reconciliation in the corporeal into a reconcil-
iation of itself within itself.” The modern reader need not be put off by
this kind of wording, which partly belongs to the period, and partly
results from Hegel’s particular intuition of abstract beings. What he
means follows clearly from his statement that “the simple solid totality
of the Ideal [as embodied in Greek art] is dissolved [in Christianity] and
it falls apart” into a spiritual, internal part and a material, external
part. ** The disintegration of classical art, then, means the end of the
aesthetic autonomy of art (based on the full unity of subject and form),
this process marks the severing of body and soul.
Christian art, Hegel says, is religious art. At a first glance, this would
not seem to be a very far-reaching statement. As we remember, all art
is concerned with the image of the Divine. In making this seemingly
obvious statement, however, Hegel has something particular in mind,
and we shall best be able to discern it when we compare classical and
Christian art. In Greece, art was the medium of the gods’ revelation. It
was only in sculpture that the Greek gods attained that perfect balance
between the physical and spiritual which is a hallmark of their divinity.
In Greece, therefore, art was the medium of religious revelation. Not so
in Christianity. The Christian icon is not essential for the revelation of
the Divine. On the contrary, when the artist takes up his job (or, as we
might add, when the work of art is presented to the audience), the
revelation is presupposed as a completed and well-known event, it is
considered as given; the artist has no part in bringing it about, in
articulating or manifesting the divine figure. The religious contents and

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even the images are not shaped in art itself; the artist finds them ready
and completed. *”
This change in the status of art follows from the religious develop-
ment itself. In Greek religion, as we have just said, the full fusion of the
human and the Divine was supposed to take place in art. Christianity
radicalized the fusion of the human and the Divine, and carried it to its
ultimate conclusion: God became a real man. The incarnation was no
longer an artistic achievement, an aesthetic experience; it became the
reality of a living, individual being.
Can the work of art still mirror the Divine under these conditions?
If judged by Greek standards, art now cannot attain its goal. “External
appearance cannot any longer express the inner life, and if it is still
called to do so it merely has the task of proving that the external is an
unsatisfying existence and must point back to the inner, to the mind
and feeling as the essential element.”°° Romantic art is an art of the
“inner life,”’ of Innerlichkeit.
Hegel also looks at the difference between Greek and Christian art
from the spectator’s point of view. The classical ideal figure “is com-
plete in itself, independent, reserved, unreceptive, a finished individual
which rejects everything else.” The spectator approaching these figures
“cannot make their existence his own.” Therefore, Hegel concludes,
“although the shapes of the eternal gods are human, they still do not
belong to the mortal realm, for these gods have not themselves experi-
enced the deficiency of finite existence. ...” Christianity teaches that
God became a real man. No wonder that “empirical man acquires an
aspect from which a relationship and point of linkage [with God] opens
up to him. .. cael
From all this follows the subject matter of Christian art: religious
imagery in general, particularly the image of Christ, and foremost the
Passion. The image of Christ, Hegel suggests, cannot be depicted with
the means and forms of classical art. Those artists who have tried to
make of Christ an almost classical figure have proceeded in the worst
possible way. Though the proper images of Christ “do display serious-
ness, calm, and dignity, Christ should have on the one hand subjective
personality and individuality, and, on the other, inwardness and purely
universal spirituality; both these characteristics are inconsistent with the

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imprint of bliss on the visible aspect of the human form.”*? Even more
than in iconlike images of Christ, this becomes obvious in depictions of
stages of the Passion. “Christ scourged, with the crown of thorns,
carrying his cross to the place of execution, nailed to the cross, passing
away in the agony of a torturing and slow death—this cannot be
portrayed in the forms of Greek beauty. . . ae
We now turn to the last part of Hegel’s aesthetics, the system of the
individual arts. The ‘“‘art forms,” we have seen, are comprehensive and
general units. Though we clearly perceive their main characteristics as
well as the differences among them, it is difficult to grasp them directly.
They can perhaps best be described as propensities that determine the
typical subject matter, typical forms, and historical development of the
arts of the ages. The individual arts, on the other hand, are more easily
perceived; they are defined by concrete, specific materials, by the senses
with which we experience the works created in them. It is obviously
easier to grasp what sculpture is than to grasp what the classical art
form is.
Hegel’s philosophy, however, is too profoundly dominated by the
notion of internal relationships to allow his consideration of the arts to
be set apart from his concept of the art forms. Each art runs a cycle of
three stages in its history, and these Hegel calls the “severe,” the
“classical,” and the “pleasing.” ** These styles represent, in a sense, the
art forms. Yet although all the art forms are thus present in every single
art, one of the arts is particularly suited to express the spirit and
character of one age and art form. To best understand each particular
art, its character, possibilities, and limitations, we have to see it in its
most appropriate historical “home,” as it were, in the art form it is
particularly suited to express.

Architecture. As distinctly fitted to manifest the ideas and mental attitudes

of the symbolic stage, architecture is the proper medium of the sym-
bolic art form. That affinity follows from a common feature that
dominates the respective structures of the symbol and the building:
“architecture corresponds to the symbolic form of art, and, as a particular
art, realizes the principle of that form in the most appropriate way,
because the meanings implanted in architecture it can in general indi-

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cate only in the externals of the environment that it creates.”°°> Put

more simply, as the object or shape that serves as a symbol is alien to
the idea it symbolizes, so the building as such is alien to the purpose for
which it is erected. It is the intrinsic tension between the two poles
that symbolism and architecture have in common, and it is the domi-
nant position of this tension that makes architecture the ideal medium
for the symbolic culture and art form.
Architecture, Hegel says, has an “external” reason. The building is
not an end in itself, its goal is “external,” it lies outside the building or
even the art of architecture. Architecture begins with putting up a hut
as a human dwelling, and the building of a temple as an enclosure for
the god and his community. There is a profound difference, therefore,
between architecture and sculpture. Works of sculpture, he believes,
carry their meaning in themselves; to works of architecture the meaning
is external.°°
In sculpture, as we know from what Hegel said in connection with
the classical art form, the unity of spirit and matter is as fully achieved
as is given to mankind. Sculpture is the art of individual, self-enclosed
bodies. This definition is, of course, not new. Fifty years earlier, Herder
had described statues as “figures of space, ”°7 as objects of full, indepen-
dent reality, whereas paintings only try to catch phenomena. But once
again Hegel brings long-standing inherent tendencies to full fruition in
systematically appraising the work of sculpture as the well-rounded
object par excellence.
What Hegel says about architectural sculpture is of particular interest
in this context. Our philosopher is intimately familiar with those stages
in the history of sculpture in which the statue is still closely related to
the building. It is impossible, he thinks, to wholly detach a statue from
its environment. Nevertheless, “‘the sculptured shape is . . . emancipated
from the architectural purpose of serving as a mere external nature and
environment for the spirit and it exists simply for its own sake.”’°® The
piece of sculpture, existing for its own sake, is the pure artistic embod-
iment of being an object.
Precisely for this reason, however, the statue is built on a tension, as
it were, and, in Hegel’s terminology, requires a “reconciliation.” “While
sculpture does indeed seem to have the advantage on the score of

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naturalness, this naturalness and corporeal externality presented in

terms of heavy matter is precisely not the nature of spirit as spirit.”°’
But the sculptor’s aim is not to manifest the nature of heavy material,
but rather to infuse into it life and spirit. This is made obvious by the
fact that the subject matter of sculpture is man himself, the human
figure and face. In seeing sculpture as the art of shaping bodies, Hegel
anticipates a great deal of modern twentieth-century thought; by seeing
the human figure as the central, perhaps the only, subject matter of
sculpture, he shows how deeply committed he was to the thought of
his own time. He is following Winckelmann in making the human
figure the sole theme of the sculptor, but he goes beyond his sources by
explaining the reason for his choice: “instead of taking for its expression
in a symbolic way modes of appearance merely indicative of the spirit,
sculpture lays hold of the human form as the actual existence of the
spirit.”°©°
How should the body be shaped in order to express the spirit? A
major part of Hegel’s discussion of the art of sculpture is devoted to
answering this question. The question itself has an obvious affinity to
the spirit and traditions of art theory; it is a question to which a
prescriptive answer is feasible. Hegel, true to the principles of his
philosophy, does not give an “‘abstract””—that is, purely prescriptive
—answer, rather, he analyzes carved imagery, particularly Greek sculp-
ture. But the student of humanistic art theory, as it was known from
the early Renaissance to the Enlightenment, feels at home, in spite of
the philosopher’s esoteric language and the introduction of the “spirit.”
What Hegel says about the arts, particularly about sculpture, is art
theory.
A characteristic indication of Hegel’s didactic attitude is his proce-
dure: he breaks up the human figure into its principal parts and analyzes
each part separately. In so doing, he relies on the authority of Winck-
elmann. It was Winckelmann, he says, who “put an end to vague
chatter about the ideal of Greek beauty by characterizing individually
and with precision the forms of the parts [of Greek statuary] —the sole
undertaking that was instructive.’’© Hegel will proceed accordingly.
“Our considerations of the ideal forms,” he announces, “‘will begin with

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the head; then, secondly, we will go on to discuss the position of the

body, and then we end with the principle for drapery.”°
We shall not here go into the details of the ideal human figure as a
sculptural theme; that would require a monograph on its own. By way
of example, I shall however look at two motifs. In his discussion of the
formation of the head, Hegel draws both on works of art and on
scientific studies. He tries to understand the Greek profile by analyzing
Greek statues, by adducing views on the functions of the individual
parts of the face (forehead, nose, mouth), and by studying physiologists
of his own time®°?—a combination of sources typical of the traditional
theory of art.
Our second example is the long excursus on the difficulties encoun-
tered by the sculptor in shaping the eye. He begins by describing what
the spectator of Greek statues sees. “We can take it here as incontest-
able that the iris and the glance expressive of the spirit is missing from
the really classic and free statues and busts preserved to us from
antiquity.” In Greek statues we find “only the wholly external shape of
the eye and ... not its animation, not a real glance, the glance of the
inner soul.’ Why is this so? In real life, Hegel believes, the eye is the
manifestation of the inward soul. We know a man’s “inmost personality
and feeling” by his glance. The gaze, he says in another formulation,
manifests “the whole inwardness of feeling.” But sculpture, we remem-
ber, is not the manifestation of the spirit in its inmost feeling; rather it
aims to show the spirit in its spatial extension. In other words, concen-
tration on spirituality and emotional life is not the business of sculpture.
“The work of sculpture,” the reader is told, “has no inwardness which
would manifest itself explicitly as this ideal glance, in distinction from
the rest of the body or thus enter the opposition between eye and
body.” To put it differently, sculpture cannot treat the eye differently
from any other part of the body, however nonspiritual that part may
be. “Sculpture has as its aim the entirety of the external form over
which it must disperse the soul.”
Moreover, the eye looks out into the external world. In life it is by
means of a glance that we establish contact with other objects, with the
outside world. Now, establishing contact with the outside world is

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opposed to the nature and aim of sculpture. The genuine sculptural

figure, Hegel tells us, “is precisely withdrawn from this link with
external things and is immersed in the substantial nature of its spiritual
content, independent in itself, not dispersed in or complicated by
anything else.”©> While this is presented as an explanation of why
Greek statues look as they do, it is not merely historical. Hegel wishes
to show what sculpture can, and what it cannot, do. The implication
for the artist is obvious.
The third art is painting. It belongs to the romantic art form, and is
the first of the three “romantic” arts—painting, music, and poetry.
The nature of painting is easily understood when we compare this art
with sculpture. It was the aim of sculpture, we have seen, to show the
perfect balance between body and mind, between spirit and matter.
The task of painting is to show the mind itself. Painting, he says, “does
not afford, as sculpture does, the fully accomplished coalescence of
spirit and body as its fundamental type, but instead the outward
appearance of the self-concentrated inner life.”°° The character of the
two arts is reflected in the specific aims of the sculptor and the painter:
the former tries to achieve purity of form and beauty of line; the latter
aims at animation in color and grace in grouping.
The more spiritual character of painting is, first of all, seen in the
very structure of the medium. The primary medium of pictorial repre-
sentation is the surface. Painting transforms three-dimensional objects
into two-dimensional images that can dwell on a flat surface. This of
course had been said countless times since the early fifteenth century;
one can hardly open an art theoretical treatise without encountering
this commonplace. But Hegel takes the reduction in dimensions as
indicating a reduction in sheer materiality. Sculpture, one knows, strikes
a balance between spirit and matter; in painting, matter is reduced and
the spirit attains superiority.
The specific medium of painting also indicates the more spiritual
nature of the art. Painting of course has components in common with
architecture and particularly with sculpture. What chiefly distinguishes
it from them are color and composition. Architecture and sculpture are
devoid of color. Even where color was used in those arts—which was
rare—it remained marginal; it never became a structural element of

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either architecture or sculpture. In painting, needless to say, matters

are otherwise. Now, color has a close connection to the spiritual and
the inner life. Hegel sees color as “the particularization of the appearance
in the picture,” and it demands a “particularization of the inner lifeet9?
Color, Hegel says, following a great tradition, is based on light and
darkness. Light is not merely a condition of visibility, as it is for
architecture and sculpture; for painting it is an intrinsic component of
the art itself.

In sculpture and architecture the shapes are made visible by light from
without. But, in painting, the material, in itself dark, has its own inner and
ideal element, namely light. The material is lit up in itself and precisely on this
account itself darkens the light. But the unity and mutual formation of light
and darkness is color.©

With regard to the other specific feature of the medium of painting,

composition, Hegel is not as explicit as one would wish him to be, but
his main thought is easily followed. Sculpture, we recall, is the art
creating the single, isolated, self-enclosed object. Painting, dealing with
appearances, catches the web of relations between figures, occasionally
even between the past and future stages of an event or an action.
Relations between the figures of a large painting, Hegel says, “betray
and mirror feeling, and therefore can be used in the happiest way for
the purpose of making the subject of the picture intelligible and individ-
ual.” Raphael’s Transfiguration shows what the philosopher means. Though
both halves of the composition are clearly kept apart, “a supreme
connection is not to be missed.”® It is this connection that makes the
picture intelligible. The use of relations as an essential means of artistic
creation is, so Hegel believes, characteristic of painting only.
The spirituality of painting is also seen in its particular affinity to the
expression of emotions, of the life of the soul. Painting “takes the heart
as a content of its production.” To be sure, painting “does indeed work
for our vision,” but what it shows us is not only an object or figure in
space “but a reflection of the spirit.” The principle of painting is, to
quote Hegel’s somewhat involved wording, “the subjectivity of the
mind which in the life of its feelings, ideas, and actions embraces the
whole of heaven and earth. .. .”°

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The nature of an art, in Hegel’s view, cannot be detached from the

specific place of that art in history. An art such as painting could attain
full realization only in the romantic age and art form—in an art form,
that is, in which the spirit has superiority over matter. The abstraction
that is the principle of painting—the reduction of dimensions —is not
“a purely capricious restriction or a lack of human skill in contrast to
nature and its productions”; rather it is “the necessary advance beyond
sculpture.”””’ In simpler words, among the visual arts painting is the art
most appropriate to the Christian world. The spiritual nature of paint-
ing makes that art best suited to represent the spiritual nature of Christ
and the Christian saints. Hegel attempts to derive from his philosophical
principles a comprehensive system of the subject matter of Christian
art. His interpretation of Christian iconography is well worth careful
study (which it does not seem to have received so far) both for the light
it may shed on Christian iconography and as a document of early
nineteenth-century thought. It is not for us here to go into these
iconographic intricacies. To give one example of Hegel’s belief in the
suitability of painting for representing the Passion of Christ I should
like to quote his observations on a picture representing the suffering
Christ.

I have in mind in particular a head in the Schleissheim gallery in which the

master (Guido Reni, I think) has discovered, as other masters too have done
in similar pictures, an entirely peculiar tone of color which is not found in the
human face [and placed it between or above the brows]. They had to disclose
the night of the spirit, and for this purpose fashioned a type of color which
corresponds in the most splendid way to this storm, to these black clouds of
the spirit that at the same time are firmly controlled and kept in place by the
brazen brow of the divine nature.”

Some modern critics may find this overinterpretation, as they would

call it, somewhat ridiculous; some have smiled condescendingly, perhaps
a little too easily. The gospel Hegel preaches is clear: it is the intimate
relationship between the particular nature of a medium and the specific
character of a type of subject matter. To speak in modern terms, it is
the gospel of the perfect fusion of form and content. Nobody in his
right mind will today deny that some, or even many, of Hegel’s

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individual conclusions are farfetched and arbitrary, that they do not

carry conviction. But the main lines of his thought on art exerted an
almost magic power, decisively shaping the thought on art in the last
two centuries, the centuries that form the modern world.

Ill. MERGING THE ARTS

I. NEW TRENDS

The comprehensive, worldwide view of the arts, so magnificently pre-

sented by Hegel, had a profound and far-reaching influence. Nobody, it
seemed for a while, could withstand the constructive, system-building
force of an intellect that assigned a place to every art, every medium,
and every style, and yet let the universe of the arts appear as a lucidly
structured whole. Was this not the final word about the interrelation
of the arts? In the 1830s, many thought so. But before the middle of the
nineteenth century an altogether different approach to the search for
the hidden and complex relationships between the arts became percep-
tible. While the Hegelian system, in origin as well as ramifications, was
primarily a German phenomenon, the new trend appeared and devel-
oped mainly in France.
It differed from the philosophical system in many respects. The
Hegelian construction was based upon a clear and sharp distinction
between one art and the other, making it possible to ascribe a particular
stage in the historical process to each specific art. Hegel here drew
from, and brought to a conclusion, the process of juxtaposing the arts
that began with Lessing’s Laocodén. The system was constructed on an
analytical basis. Painting or sculpture, it was taken as axiomatic, belong
to an altogether different dimension than that of the literary arts, poetry
has a wholly different basis than architecture or music. The more
sharply one art is distinguished from the other, the better it can be
made to fit into the overall design. The new trend that appeared in
mid-century France adopted a completely different attitude. It did not
dwell on the unbridgeable gap between one art and the other, but
rather stressed their partial fusion, the possibility of one art changing

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into another. It is not a matter of chance that the double perception

sometimes called ‘“‘synaesthesia” was often considered a proper way of
experiencing a work of art, and of accounting for that experience.
The fusionist trend did not enjoy that high level of conceptual
thinking and philosophical articulation that was the hallmark of the
analytical tradition culminating in Hegel’s system. In studying this new
approach we are faced with an intellectual and emotional atmosphere,
or climate, rather than a philosophical system. Yet students of history
do not need to be told that intellectual and emotional climates, even if
not fully articulate, are often more powerful as historical motivations
than are highly articulate abstract systems. It was only towards the end
of the nineteenth century, that is, at a time that lies well beyond the
limits of the present discussion, that the new trend came to full fruition.
At the middle of the century, only its bare outlines had become visible.
Like the analytical trend, the trend that seeks to merge the arts takes
its departure from the axiom that each of the major arts is rooted in
one of the senses; there is an art of the eye, an art of the ear, an art of
touch. Now, if the perceptions of the different senses can, to a certain
degree, merge into one another, so can the respective arts that are
based on them. It is a matter of experience, or so it was believed, that
perceptions arising from two or more senses can be linked together.
Two modes of sensation can be affected when only one sense is being
stimulated. Describing one kind of sensation in terms of another is
known as synaesthesia. Here color is attributed to sounds, taste to
colors, sound to odors. The underlying assumption in this way of
thinking is that it is possible to translate, even if metaphorically,
experience in the domain of one sense into that of another. A famous
example, frequently repeated, is the old story of someone born blind
having explained to him what the color scarlet is by being told that it is
like the sound of a trumpet. ”°
Synaesthesia, then, naturally tends towards the merging of the senses.
The translation from one sense into another has been explained as a
survival from an earlier, comparatively undifferentiated sensorium. We
cannot go into what the scientists say, but as far as the theory of art is
concerned, we can be sure that this notion leads to breaking through
the barriers separating one art from the other in the analytical trend.

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The effects of such ways of thinking could have been observed in the
late nineteenth century and in the twentieth.
The idea of merging the senses, or translating the impression received
by one sense into that of another, is of course not an invention of the
modern age. Ever since Antiquity, such translations were projected onto
nature and used in the arts. One of the most famous examples is the
“music of the spheres.” It was even used as a scientific hypotheses:
Robert Fludd explained the “harmony of the spheres” by assuming the
existence of a “sphere pipe,” on which light—the breath of the
Creator, as it were—acts as the breath of man acts on the air.
Particularly since the late Renaissance, attempts were constantly made
to convert such beliefs into tangible reality: Vincenzo Galilei, the father
of the famous physicist Galileo Galilei, tried to build and perfect the
color piano. In art theory of that period, synaesthesia was an approach
often used. Poussin’s famous letter concerning the different modes of
pictorial expression is perhaps the most important testimony to it:
basing himself on the Greek theory of musical modes, he translated
them into types of pictorial expression. ”°
In the mid-nineteenth century the leaning towards merging the
senses and the arts, or at least finding some analogies between them,
played an important part in artistic creation. Historians of the visual
arts as well as students of the other arts and of aesthetic thought often
spoke of “correspondences” between the arts or of the Gesamtkunstwerk
(the comprehensive work of art). Here I shall consider only some of the
most conspicuous formulations of the subject in art theory.

2. CHEVREUL

I shall begin with Michel Eugéne Chevreul (1786-1889), a professor of

organic chemistry famous in his time for his study of the components
of fats and the nature of soap. In his youth he was appointed director
of a laboratory in a large Gobelin factory and made a significant study
of dyes. He summed up his findings in a large tome, De la loi du contraste
simultane des couleurs, ’° which appeared in 1839 and became the basis for
many nineteenth-century color studies. Chevreul obviously deals with
sense impressions from a point of view different from that of the

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student of art. However, in what he adduces from the questions he

investigated, the historian of aesthetic thought will find much that is
new and also significant for the study of art. Perhaps most important
are his emphases.
Chevreul, we must remember, worked in an industry; he was there-
fore concerned both with how objects in which dyes play a major role
are produced and with how the spectator—here one should perhaps
say the prospective customer
— perceives them. In principle, he accepts
the common wisdom of his time: to form a harmony, colors must be
perceived in a succession of tones. We recall that from precisely the
same observation— that is, the difference between the senses— Lessing
concluded that the arts of space and time, that is, of simultaneity and
succession, can never be united. What is permitted to literature (like
music, an art of time) is not permitted to sculpture and painting, arts
of space. ’” What is appropriate for one art cannot be transferred to or
translated into another. What Chevreul added to this general principle
does not always observe the official line; it compels the student to
devote some careful attention to his work.
Among Chevreul’s contributions to the theory of art (though it was
not his intention to discuss the arts), two points should be considered
in our present context. First, he does not see the difference in the
perception of the different senses as an unbridgeable abyss; there are
similarities as well as differences between the perceptions of the eye
and the ear, touch, taste, and smell. He begins his discussion of the
differences between the senses with what sounds almost like an apology:
“If it is philosophical to explore what the senses, in their structure and
function, have in common, it is not less so to find out what are the
special differences that distinguish between them” (5313967). It is under
the heading of a “double relationship” (double rapport) that he investi-
gates the impressions of all the senses, and particularly the perception
of color, his major subject.
The second point is even less revolutionary. It consists in explicitly
making the spectator a kind of last resort in investigating the relation-
ships between colors and sounds. No words need be wasted to show
that the spectator, in one form or another, was always at the back of
art theoreticians’ minds. It is, however, true that in modern times the

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emphasis in assessing relationships between different media has been

shifted to the spectator or the audience in general. Chevreul reflects
this shift, and he does so particularly clearly in his treatment of the
interaction of the different senses.
The greatest proximity, Chevreul believes, prevails between hearing
and sight. Everybody “knows the reconciliation (rapprochement) one has
made between sounds and colors” (535;973). In our present context, it
may be worth recalling that in the comparisons of the senses and of the
arts based on them that had been made throughout the ages, sight and
hearing, or painting and music, were as a rule considered the main
protagonists. “Which is the more damaging to a man, to lose his sight
or his hearing?””—so Leonardo asks, taking the selection of these two
particular senses as a matter of course.® Chevreul is naturally aware of
the opposition between these two senses; he cannot have failed to note
that placing them side by side in this way only deepens the contrast
between them. And yet he finds parallels, or “analogies,” as he has it,
between the two senses.
There are to Chevreul two principal kinds of analogies between
hearing and sight, one in the domain of what may be described as the
“objective” existence of the sense impressions, the other “subjective,”
pertaining to our perception of sounds and colors. The first analogy,
only briefly indicated, is anchored in the science of the time: both sound
and colors are propagated by waves (535;973). The theory of waves
refers to something taking place outside the spectator; it warrants an
“objective” analogy between colors and sounds.
More space is devoted to the other analogy, which is in the way we
perceive the objects of the two senses. In dealing with perception, it is
true, Chevreul claims that “today the specific difference between sounds
and colors strikes me more than their generic resemblance” (5353974).
For the study of nineteenth-century art theory, however, his view of
the “generic resemblance” is of more interest. It is significant, I think,
that Chevreul founds this kind of resemblance primarily in aesthetic
experience. It is the harmony of beautifully ordered colors that is
analogous to the harmony of beautifully ordered sounds (5 373977).’”He
recalls the eighteenth-century French Jesuit priest, Louis Bertrand Cas-
tel (whom Rousseau called “the Don Quixote of Mathematics’’), who

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invented the so-called ocular clavecin, in which colored tapes represent-

ing harpsicord or clavecin wires presented a color pageant in a darkened
room. (Incidentally, it may be worth recalling that in our own time
Scriabin and Schoenberg have experimented with the projection of light
by color organs). sat
Chevreul’s comparison of colors and sounds is on a high conceptual
level, and, at least implicitly, raises questions of far-reaching conse-
quence. Sounds, he believes, have an existence of their own, their
reality is independent of anything else (536;975). Do colors also have an
existence of their own, a being that would be comparable to that of
sounds? Chevreul, we should not forget, does not speak of the use of
colors in painting; his concerns are tapestries and carpets. And yet he
sometimes anticipates much later developments both in painting and in
the theory of art. Before following Chevreul’s comparison of sounds
and colors, we should make clear to ourselves what is actually being
asked when one wonders whether colors have an existence of their
own, comparable to that of sounds. An analysis of Chevreul’s formula-
tion necessarily leads us to the conclusion that what his question
actually amounts to is whether color can be perceived as detached from
the objects “on” which it is normally seen (536f;976).
The formulation is not as strange as it may seem at first. The student
of color theories will remember the view, so often expressed, to the
effect that we cannot see colors as such, only colored objects. For ages,
the Aristotelian tradition, which had such an overwhelming influence
on European scientific thought, claimed that color is a quality of objects
and therefore cannot be detached from them. The precise terminology
of the Aristotelian tradition declares that color is ‘the surface of
objects.””*!
Now, there are conditions under which we do perceive pure colors.
A ray of sun refracted in a prism and reflected onto a white surface
shows us pure colors. The color is here “pure,” so we understand,
because it is detached from any specific object and does not evoke the
association of an object. But does this also hold true for ordinary
experience? Science, isolating its object from everyday experience, cre-
ates artificial conditions. Are we likely to experience such pure colors

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outside the laboratory? Chevreul doubts it. The reason for his scepticism
is that the vast majority of people will confound the color with the
object on which it appears; when people retain the memory of colors,
these colors are always attached to material objects (537;976). It is this
adherence to objects that prevents colors from having an independent
existence. Sounds do have such an existence because they are not
attached to anything besides themselves. If we voice this idea in the
terminology of aesthetics, we will have to say that colors fulfill a
mimetic function (they conjure up an object), while sounds do not.
Colors portray objects, but sounds do not.
The modern reader cannot help speculating as to what Chevreul
would say if he were to see a twentieth-century “abstract” painting.
How would he reflect on the color in a Kandinsky, say, or a Rothko?
Would he deny independent existence to the colors in the works of
these two painters? Any hypothetical question of this kind remains, of
course, unanswerable. We have nothing to rely on but Chevreul’s logic.
But were we to follow out his logic, we would have to conclude that
he would accept such paintings as equivalent to music, and thus
concede to their colors the same full and independent existence that, in
his time, he granted to sounds only.
In conclusion, | shall make a more general observation. Chevreul
represents the thought and mentality of the “scientist,” as the early
nineteenth century understood that term. His turn of mind was clearly
influenced by the positivistic trend then beginning to make itself felt.
What counted for him were “facts” and objective findings. It is inter-
esting to note that in precisely these conditions the idea of the specta-
tor, and of his seemingly “subjective” reactions to external stimuli,
emerges so powerfully. The decisive facts Chevreul adduces in order to
grant or deny independent existence to sound and color are not their
—objective, measurable—mode of propagation; in this, as we have
seen, they are identical. Where they differ is principally in how the
spectator perceives them, and he perceives them differently not only
because he perceives them by different senses (hearing or sight) but
mainly because he perceives them in different matrixes, as it were.
Colors evoke associations of objects, sounds do not. It is this reaction

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or behavior of the spectator that ultimately decides the philosophical

standing of color and sound and, by implication, of the arts based
on them.

3. DELACROIX
The intellectual climate of the early and mid-nineteenth century made
it possible for the ideas of synaesthesia to permeate the thought of the
artists themselves. Among the painters of that time one will hardly find
a better example of this learning than Eugéne Delacroix. I shall try to
outline Delacroix’s significance for the art theory of his century in a
later chapter. *” Here | shall only comment on his views concerning the
relationships between the arts. For Delacroix, as for Chevreul, this
primarily meant the relations between sound and color, that is, between
music and painting, though he also made some interesting observations
on the role of touch in his reflections on painting.
Delacroix was concerned with music, both in listening to it and in
trying to come to terms with the theoretical problems it presents to the
music lover and more specifically, to the painter. He entertained friend-
ships with musicians, primarily with Frédéric Chopin, and derived a
great deal of inspiration from these contacts. All this followed, of
course, from a general disposition of the times. It has been pointed out
that Delacroix was deeply affected by the trend of thought, prevailing
in large parts of French culture in his time, that saw in the depiction of
the intangible the major aim of painting. *° Now, if painting is to express
the intangible, it is music rather than any of the other arts (such as
sculpture or poetry) that becomes the main model, that shows most
affinities. The new prestige of music as a model for the arts, which has
not gone unnoticed by scholars,** also led to a certain blurring of the
outlines dividing the specific values of painting from those of music.
Delacroix’s awareness of the other arts, of their character and inter-
relations, is often manifested in his Journal. However, it would be
difficult to claim that he had a consistent and unified approach to the
intricate problems posed by the doctrine of synaesthesia. Sometimes he
compares the arts with each other, thus bringing out the individual,
unique nature of each rather than what they have in common. In such

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notes one cannot help feeling the survival of the Renaissance paragone
tradition, which, as is well known, stressed the differences between the
arts, not their common nature. More often, however, he softens the
juxtaposition, transferring features from one art to the other. This is
particularly true for music and painting.
From music he learned about the relationship between science and
the arts in general. On April 7, 1849, a conversation with his friend
Frédéric Chopin revealed to Delacroix the profound identity of science
and art. What establishes logic in music?: this was the question the
painter posed to the musician. Chopin made Delacroix feel ‘what
counterpoint and harmony are; how the fugue is like pure logic in
music. ...”” That feeling, he notes, gave him an “‘idea of the pleasure in
science that is experienced by philosophers worthy of that name.”
Science “is not what is ordinarily understood under that term, that is
to say, a department of knowledge which differs from art.” It is, as he
puts it, “reason itself, adorned by genius.””*° Science itself, then, ac-
quires an aesthetic quality. It is not an accumulation of individual
cognitions about the world, a kind of stocktaking of what is encoun-
tered in reality, but rather perfect order of the kind that music makes
accessible to the senses. No wonder that Delacroix felt he could apply
the same insight to painting as well as to music.
A few years later, on December 12, 1856, he looks to Mozart for
guidance in a matter of great consequence for a Romantic artist,
particularly in that late stage where awareness of the autonomy of art
was gaining increasing significance. Delacroix was not concerned with
the question, so important for the artists of many ages, of how to
express passion convincingly without endangering the genuine character
of art as such. To put it in present-day terms: how do you convincingly
express emotions without turning your picture into a poster? Here, it
seemed to Delacroix, the great composer of music holds an answer.
“Mozart writes in a letter somewhere, speaking of the principle that
music can express all the passions, all the sorrows, all sufferings:
‘Nevertheless, the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so
expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in
situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear, but
should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.’ wee The

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idea itself is of course not new, it has often been expressed and
reformulated. What is here of significance is that Delacroix turns to a
musician for an answer, obviously believing that what is true for music
can also be valid for painting.
Delacroix’s synaesthetic reflections are not limited to the mutual
connections and influences of painting and music. It is true that, for
reasons we have indicated, music played a particularly significant part
in the thought of painters who aimed to render the intangible, but
sheer tangibility was a dimension of experience they could ill afford to
neglect. And indeed in a lengthy entry in his Journal, made on January
13, 1857——one of the notes he wrote down in preparation for the
dictionary of pictorial terms he planned to compose—we find some
interesting observations on touch and on what touch can mean for
painting. Delacroix made this entry at least four decades before the
problem of touch—whether real or imagined—arose conspicuously in
the writings of art historians and interpreters of style. It was only in
1g01 that Alois Riegl, mainly in his Spatrémische Kunstindustrie (Late
Roman Arts and Crafts), contrasted “tactic” (or “haptic,” ’ as he later
called it) experiences, that is, impressions appealing to the sense of
touch, with what he called “optical” impressions. *” In speaking about
“tactic,” Riegl did not mean actual tangibility; rather he used the term
in a way that can be described as metaphorical. Riegl’s “haptic” forms
are totally located in painting, in an art that, in actual fact, is experi-
enced by the eye only. A few years before Riegl, another writer on art,
Bernard Berenson in his influential work The Florentine Painters (1896),
described Giotto as “giving tactile values to retinal impressions.”** Riegl
and Berenson, and the many students following in the footsteps of these
unequal scholars, were drawing the specific, critical conclusions from
the development of synaesthetic thought in earlier parts of the nine-
teenth century. In the 1850s, when Delacroix was reflecting on touch
in painting, many of the ideas that were to dominate later thinking
existed only in embryonic form. The main line of thought, however,
can be clearly discerned.
That we are here witnessing an important idea in a very early stage
can best be seen when we consider what is missing in Delacroix’s
thought; it suffers mainly from insufficient analytical distinction be-

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tween the different aspects of the notion. In speaking about touch,

Delacroix has two different things in mind, and sometimes they cannot
be clearly distinguished from each other. In one sense of “touch,” it is
the picture as an artifact that is considered. There are many ways of
studying a painting, we read in the Journal, and one of them is to
observe the painter’s way of touching the canvas. These touches leave
traces on the work of art, and the spectator, or connoisseur, can follow
them. The painter’s touch, Delacroix believes, “gives to the painting an
accent which the tints, melted together, cannot produce.”*? Moreover,
when touch is “applied vigorously,” it makes some of the objects or
figures depicted “come forward.” He notes critically that “many mas-
ters have taken care not to permit the spectator to feel” the painter’s
touch. These masters believe that complete finish is an embodiment of
perfection. It is not difficult to sense in these remarks the echo of
Delacroix’s antagonism to academic art, perhaps particularly to Ingres.
The traces left by the painter’s hand, however, are not the only
meaning of “touch.” In another sense, that term refers to the material
reality depicted in the painting, and it evokes feelings and memories of
texture. In other words, here “touch” refers to a dimension of reality
that can really be experienced by physical touch alone. Some artists,
Delacroix says, obviously referring to representatives of the academic
trend, believe that by avoiding touch “one gets close to the effect of
nature. Such a belief is ‘puerile.’”” In an illuminating aside, he adds:
“One might just as well put real colored reliefs onto one’s picture.””°
This implicit juxtaposition of real nature and colored relief shows, |
believe, that in speaking about touch Delacroix did not have bulging
volume in mind. Sheer mass and volume are common to the natural
object and the colored relief. Where they differ is in the material
character of the bulging body. As opposed to the colored relief, bodies
and objects in nature have an infinite variety of textures: they are hard
or soft, smooth or rough, solid or hairy or fluid, and so on. Now, all
these qualities one experiences only by real touch, by actual tactile
experience. It is the imagined tactile experience that the painter con-
jures up by a proper representation of the object. In an engraving, he
says, “the whole wealth of nature is expressed without employing the
magic of color—not for the purely physical sense of sight, but for the

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eyes of the mind and the soul; they behold the fresh splendor in the skin
of the young girl, the wrinkles of the old man, the soft depth of clothes,
the transparence of waters, the faraway look of skies and mountains.”
It is obvious that “touch” here refers to the material nature itself.
Delacroix clearly assumes the transfer, or translation, of experience in
the domain of one sense into that of another.

4. BAUDELAIRE
Among the most profound and, with regard to nineteenth-century
theory of art, probably the most influential articulation of the synaesth-
etic approach is that given by the great French poet and critic of many
arts, Charles Baudelaire, who in several respects marks a watershed of
aesthetic thought in the modern age. The scope and range of Baude-
laire’s theoretical reflections on the arts are very wide. The interrelation
between the arts, though not devoid of significance, is not the center of
his thought, which is dominated by other themes, such as the artist’s
imagination. We shall therefore not present Baudelaire’s aesthetic thought
here; we shall do that in the last chapter of this book.”! At this stage, |
shall only summarily outline his reflections on the topic here discussed,
the relationship between painting and sculpture and the other arts.
Baudelaire’s celebrated collection of poems, The Flowers of Evil (Les
Fleurs du mal), contains a poem called “Correspondances” that was to
exert a great influence on modern poetry. A poem, of course, is usually
not a theoretical text, but in this case Baudelaire was making an
important statement about the links between the senses, and, by impli-
cation, between the arts. This rhymed statement, as Wellek claims,
served as a starting point for a renewed interest in synaesthesia. ”? The
opening stanzas of the poem should be quoted in our discussion.

Nature is a temple where living pillars

At times allow confused words to come forth;
There man passes through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar eyes.

Like long echoes which in a distance are mingled

In a dark and profound unison

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Vast as night and light,

Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another.”?

In this poem Baudelaire proclaims an occult theory. In a broader

discussion of Baudelaire, in the last chapter of this book, we shall see
how wide the range of his sources was. Important among them were
esoteric doctrines and mystical trends, particularly the theories of the
Swedish scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. But it was from
sources closer to his own time and to the arts with which he was
concerned that he could derive inspiration as to the correspondences
between colors, sounds, and smells. From the German Romantic poet
and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann he learned a great deal about the
correspondences between colors and sounds. In his Salon 1846 review,
Baudelaire quotes a long passage from Hoffmann. This passage is so
important for the understanding of Baudelaire that it is worth giving at
length.

It is not only in dreams [so Hoffmann writes], or in that mild delirium

which precedes sleep, but it is even awakened when I hear music—that
perception of an analogy and an intimate connection between colors, sounds,
and perfumes. It seems to me that all these things were created by one and
the same ray of light, and that their combination must result in a wonderful
concert of harmony. The smell of red and brown marigolds above all produces
a magical effect on my being. It makes me fall into a deep reverie, in which |
seem to hear the solemn, deep tones of the oboe in the distance.”*

Considering Baudelaire’s stature as a critic, we must ask what these

and similar statements actually meant. To take an example; what did he
actually wish to say when he wrote that “no musician excels as Wagner
does in painting space and depth, both material and spiritual”??? Or
when, in a long and serious study, he asserted that “color speaks”?”°
For Baudelaire, a divinely inspired poet, the synaesthetic metaphor had
semimagical power. This real charm of going beyond the boundaries
separating the senses may also have been reflected in his personal
experience. Color induced in Baudelaire a state of euphoria comparable
to the state to which he was brought by music.”’ While all these
suggestions may be true, one finds it difficult to accept them as a full
explanation. Baudelaire was not only a poet; he was also a great critic.

PAA
 Modern Theories of Art

He may not have been a philosopher intent on establishing sharp lines

of demarcation between one domain and the other, as Hegel had been,
yet his thought is not devoid of a specific severity and strictness. What,
then, did he mean by the synaesthetic metaphors?
The answer is not easily given. Some of Baudelaire’s theoretical
statements seem to plainly contradict any serious synaesthetic consid-
eration; they indicate that he at least hesitated to take his metaphors at
face value. Thus he declares that “the encroachment of one art upon
the other” is a vice. “Every art,” the reader is told, “must be sufficient
to itself and at the same time stay within its providential limits.” There
is in his age, he admits, a tendency towards the fusing of the arts, but
this tendency is a symptom of an age of decadence. 8 Reading such
sober warnings, the modern student wonders whether he should not
consider all Baudelaire’s statements ascribing sounds to color, or color
(and space) to sounds, as mere literary flourishes, metaphors that are
not to be taken seriously.
Other considerations, however, seem to point in the‘opposite direc-
tion. Though Baudelaire may not have taken his metaphors literally, he
does seem to have believed that there is a kind of real translation, based
on hidden affinities, from one sense into another and from one art into
another. To some contemporary critics who claimed that music, unlike
painting and poetry, is “not able to translate all or anything with
precision,” he answers that, up to a certain point, this is indeed so, but
this is not the whole story. “Music translates in its own way and using
means that are proper to its" Seeing how consistently Baudelaire
employs the synaesthetic metaphors makes one hesitate to assume that
they were merely meant as embellishments, devoid of real substance.
But we do not have to rely on occasional metaphors only. In the
theoretical essays he made some statements of principle, which, even if
not taken at face value, demand to be considered seriously. To adduce
an obvious example, I shall mention the discussion of color in his review
of the 1846 Salon. “In color are to be found harmony, melody, and
counterpoint.” This is not meant in a general way. Baudelaire explains:
Harmony is the basis of the theory of color.
Melody is unity within color, or overall color.
Melody calls for a cadence; it is a whole, in which every effect contributes
to the general effect. ee
 Unity and Diversity of the Visual Arts

Where precisely is the link between color and sound, or between

painting and music? Where do the two senses meet and interpenetrate?
It is difficult to say. Baudelaire seems to imply that it is the experience
of the spectator that provides the link. To the significance of the
spectator in his thought we shall come back at a later stage of our
survey. |! Here | should like only to mention that in his essay on the
Tannhduser performance in Paris, '!°*he makes a single, but rather clear,
suggestion. As we have already noted, he says that “‘music translates in
its own way and using means that are proper to it.” To this he makes
an important, if brief, addition: “In music, just as in painting and even
in the written word, which is nevertheless the most positive of the arts,
there is always a lacuna which is filled by the listener’s imagination.” '”*
Here then, in the spectator’s or listener’s imagination, the “translation”
takes place.
In Baudelaire’s reflection on the relationship between the arts, color
and sound hold primacy of place. He also devoted some attention to
the art of sculpture.
The nineteenth century, particularly in France, has little to show in
the way of theory and criticism of sculpture. Only early in the century
do German philosophers deal with sculpture as the art typical of Greek
culture, as we have seen in Hegel’s deliberations on art forms.!°* In
mid-nineteenth-century France, Viollet-le-Duc, architect and theoreti-
cian of architecture, as a matter of course treated sculpture as an art
supplementary to architecture. 105 At the end of the century, however,
we do not find a theory of sculpture. Baudelaire, it has recently been
said, seems to have been the only author to produce a “romantic theory
of sculpture.”
!°° To be sure, sculpture is not a major theme in Baude-
laire’s art theory, but he returned to the subject several times, devoting
short sections to sculpture in his reviews of the Salons of 1845, 1846,
and 18¢9.'°” In the years between 1845 and 1859 his views on many
subjects may have changed, but they remained remarkably stable with
regard to sculpture. In the three reviews mentioned, the careful reader
can detect the outlines of a theory of sculpture. I shall present them
briefly.
I shall begin with the position Baudelaire assigns to sculpture. In
general, he was not given to ranking the arts; he stresses their possible
merging much more than their possible hierarchy. When he speaks of

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sculpture, however, he often suggests its low rank, sometimes using

very strong words to express his disregard for it. A section in his review
of the 1846 Salon bears the memorable title “Why Sculpture is Tire-
some.” !°8 And he has good reason to find sculpture boring. It is in fact,
he thinks, inferior to all the other arts, particularly painting.
Baudelaire’s low opinion of sculpture can be summed up in three
points. His reasons refer to features that are central to the character of
sculpture, and these, he believes, are all “disadvantages.” They are not
accidental features; rather, they are, as Baudelaire explicitly points out,
“a necessary consequence of its [that is, sculpture’s] means and mate-
rials.”
The first point—and it seems to be the most important—is that
sculpture is close to nature. This claim offers the historian an excellent
opportunity to appreciate the intellectual distance between the begin-
ning and the climax of the modern age, that is, the distance between
the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. In the Renaissance, an
author could hardly pay a greater compliment to a work of art, or to
an art form, than to declare that it was close to nature. (This, inciden-
tally, was true regardless of how sophisticated, or primitive, the work
of art or the art form might be.) For the mid-nineteenth century,
“closeness to nature” is no longer a complimentary description. With
Baudelaire, it rather sounds like a censure. Sculpture, he says in his
1846 essay, is “as brutal and positive as nature herself.” To properly
understand what Baudelaire means, we should keep in mind that he is
not speaking of a style—say, realism—that makes the work of art
appear like nature; he is speaking of the very medium of sculpture, of
the art form itself.
The statue is close to nature because it is a real object, a three-
dimensional thing or body. That a piece of sculpture is a real object, a
material thing rather than an image conjured up by art, is reflected in
the way primitive people react to it. In reviewing the Salon of 1869,
Baudelaire offers the following piece of anthropological speculation:
Faced with an object taken from nature and represented by sculpture—
that is to say, a round, three-dimensional object about which one can move
freely, and, like the natural object itself, enveloped in atmosphere—the
peasant, the savage or the primitive man feels no indecision; whereas a

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painting, because of its immense pretensions and its paradoxical and abstrac-
tive nature, will disquiet and upset him. pe

Primitive people and savages—so we can explicate Baudelaire’s thought

—are used to handling material objects, and therefore a piece of
sculpture, which is such an object, does not cause them feelings of
anxiety. Painting, on the other hand, is a more abstract, a more
“spiritual” art, and it is precisely this spirituality that upsets the
primitive mind.
A second reason for Baudelaire’s low esteem of sculpture is what he
calls the “vagueness and ambiguity” of this att) Sculpture is ambigu-
ous, while painting is not. That vagueness is located in the way the
spectator looks at the work of art. Painting requires the spectator to
take up one single point of view, and that vantage point is prescribed:
necessarily it is in front of the painting. Sculpture allows—and some-
times even invites—the spectator to move around the figure, offering
him ‘a hundred different points of view.” Ultimately, then, it will be
the spectator, not the artist, who will choose the point of view from
which to look at the statue, and, as a result, the spectator will also
determine what he will actually see of the work of art.
This, of course, is no novel observation. That painting offers but one
vantage point while sculpture offers many—this was a regular topos in
the art literature of the Renaissance and Baroque, and was repeated a
great many times. In these periods, advocates of sculpture stressed the
multitude of viewpoints a statue offers the spectator as a reason for the
superiority of sculpture over painting. The carving of the statue, they
said, is a more complex and difficult affair than the painting of a
picture. “I maintain,” wrote Benvenuto Cellini in a famous letter, “that
among all the arts based on design, sculpture is seven times the greatest,
because a statue must have eight show-sides and all should be equally
good.” 'l! Tn the nineteenth century, the criteria for assessing the value
of an art form have changed. Now, the difficulties overcome (possibly
still a craftman’s outlook) can no longer serve as a yardstick for
measuring the value of a work of art or an art form. Now other
yardsticks are employed, among them also “spirituality.”
There is still another reason for Baudelaire’s small regard for sculp-

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ture. In moving around a piece of sculpture, “it often happens that

through a chance trick of the light, an effect of the lamp, [the spectator]
may discover a beauty which is not at all the one the artist had in mind
—and this is a humiliating thing for him.” ''? It is worth noting:
Baudelaire does not question that the configuration so accidentally
discovered is really beautiful; what humiliates the artist is not the lack
of beauty in his work; it is rather that the beauty that is really there is
not the one he had in mind. The ultimate value of the work of art—
this is the idea that underlies all Baudelaire’s aesthetics —follows from
its being altogether the intentional product of man. A beauty that is not
intended belongs to nature rather than to art.
Given all these reasons, it follows that the audience of sculpture
consists, as we have already seen, of “the peasant, the savage, or the
primitive man.” This is the type of person who cannot grasp the
spirituality of painting. Used to handling material things, the primitive
spectator cannot comprehend something that is mere appearance. Look
how the primitive reacts to painting, Baudelaire seems to be saying. He
tells the story of the native chief whom an American painter repre-
sented in profile. The chief’s friends accused the painter of having
robbed half of the chief’s face, and laughed at the chief for losing it.
They could not grasp the abstraction in painting. “In the same way
monkeys have been known to be deceived by some magical painting of
nature and to go round behind the picture in order to find the other
side Sculpture, the author says, is thus restricted by “barbarous
conditions.” Save for exceptional cases, it “will only produce the
>

marvellous object which dumbfounds the ape and the savage.”

Baudelaire’s treatment of sculpture, fragmentary and sketchy as it
may be, has a significance that goes beyond his opinions of that
particular art. What follows from it is that Baudelaire, in addition to
his belief in the ultimate unity of art (and it is this underlying unity that
makes the “translation” from one art into another possible), also be-
lieved in a hierarchy of the arts. His notion of such a hierarchy is even
less articulate and explicit than his concept of the potential unity of the
arts. But even though the concept is vague, our author obviously
assumes that there are arts (such as painting and music) that are more
spiritual and another (sculpture) that is less so.
This image of a hierarcy of the arts, vaguely and hazily outlined

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somewhere in the background of Baudelaire’s thought, is not historical.

To him, sculpture is inferior to painting in all times and ages. And yet
this vague hierarchy is not devoid of a suggestion of a historical order.
It is especially the remarks on sculpture that make this clear. To be
sure, in Baudelaire’s writings on the arts we cannot find anything
comparable to Hegel’s detailed historical construction. However, Bau-
delaire clearly links sculpture with the early stages of history. Sculpture,
then, is not only the art closest to nature, it not only appeals to the
least developed of audiences, it is also the art typical of the initial stages
of mankind. “The origin of sculpture is lost in the mists of time”: thus
begins the section on sculpture in the review of the 1846 Salon. “We
find, in fact,” so he continues, “that all races bring real skill to the
carving of fetishes long before they embark upon the art of painting,
which is an art involving profound thought and one whose very enjoy-
ment demands a particular initiation.” Here, then, the primitive char-
acter of sculpture is clearly linked with its origin in the beginnings of
history, and with its being the art intelligible and appealing to primitive
peoples. Painting, an art demanding thought and involving an initiation,
came a long time after sculpture was practiced. It is not an exaggeration
to say that for Baudelaire sculpture is the art typical of the early states
of mankind. It is not surprising, then, that in later times sculpture could
not remain an independent art. “Once out of the primite era, sculpture,
in its most magnificent development, is nothing else but a complementary
att Vaguely in the background, we perceive the idea of a progress
of art, a progress that leads from a more primitive to a more sophisti-
cated art form. Did any influence from the Hegelian historical philoso-
phy of aesthetics reach the synaesthetic approach of the French poet? It
is not for us here even to attempt an answer.''° Be that as it may, it is
perhaps permissible to see Baudelaire as completing the development
that began with Lessing.

NOTES

be By Ber. Gombrich, in “Lessing,” Proceedings of the British Academy 43 (1957):133—

156. For the sentence quoted, See Di 3.9: This paper is reprinted in Gombrich’s
 Modern Theories of Art

Tributes (Oxford, 1983). I shall use the original edition; page references will be
given, in parentheses, in the text.
. See G. Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ Arte de la Pittura (Milan, 1584; reprinted
Hildesheim, 1968), p. 282 (in Chapter 2 of Book 6, devoted to the prattica of
painting). For this subject in general, see Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The
Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York, 1967), and Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The
Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton, 1970).
. The Art of Painting of Charles Alphonse de Fresnoy, translated into English verse by
William Mason (York, 1783), p. 1.
. See Joshua Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses Delivered to the Royal Academy (London and
New York, n. d.), pp. 132 on Shakespeare (eighth discourse) and 252 on Michael
Angelo (fifteenth discourse). For Reynolds’s views on art, see above, pp. 132 ff.
. The full text of this early sketch is reprinted in Hugo Bliimner, ed., Lessings
Laokoon (Berlin, 1880), pp. 358-359.
. See G. E. Lessing, Laocoén, translated by R. Phillimore (London, n. d.), p. 3. All
quotations from Laocoén will be taken from this translation. References in the
text, given in parentheses, are also to this edition.
. Lessing’s Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts have, of course, frequently been reprinted. |
use the edition of Lessings Werke, edited by Theodor Matthias (Leipzig, n. d.). For
the passage referred to, see Vol. V, pp. 133 ff So far as I know, the Briefe
antiquarischen Inhalts have not appeared in an English translation.
. For an interesting discussion of Lessing’s text from the point of view of present-
day semiotics, see David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoén: Semiotics and Aesthetics in
the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984).
. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris, 1708), II, p. 358. The English
translation of this work, The Principles of Painting (London, 1743), was not
available to me. For Roger de Piles (though dealing mainly with different
problems), see Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art (New Haven and
London, 1985).
. See Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (reprinted Geneva,
1967), p. 111 (p. 415 of the first volume in the original edition). For Dubos, see
above, pp. 000 ff. Historians of semiotics will be interested in the distinction
between “aniconic” and “iconic” signs that is implied in Dubos’s thought.
1Uks See Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoén, pp. 105 ff.
Wz. Bliimner, Lessings Laokoon, p. 447, for the text of the preparatory note. See also
Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon, p. 106.
. Translations from the first chapter of Lessing’s treatise on the fable, for which
see ‘Abhandlung iiber die Fabel” in Lessings Werke, ed. Matthias, V, pp. 5 ff Cf.
especially pp. 16 ff.
. The full title of Herder’s treatise is Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen iiber Form und
Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume. | use the edition Johann Gottfried von Herder’s
sdmmtliche Werke. Zur schdnen Literatur und Kunst, Part Eleven, Zur rémischen
Literatur. Antiquarische Aufsdtze (Tiibingen, 1809), pp. 239-363. Hereafter, page
references to this edition will be given, in parentheses, in the text. There seems

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 Unity and Diversity of the Visual Arts

to be no English translation of Plastik. There are not many modern discussions of

this text, but see Bernhard Schweitzer, ‘“Herders ‘Plastik’ und die Entstehung
der neueren Kunstwissenschaft,” in Schweitzer’s Zur Kunst der Antike: Ausgewahlte
Schriften (Tiibingen, 1963), I, pp-198=252.
Though the literature on Herder is very large, we still lack a thorough discussion
of his contribution to our specific field of study. Interesting in a general sense
are Isaiah Berlin’s observations in Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas
(New York, 1976). H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science
(Cambridge, 1970), is useful for understanding the broader contexts of Herder’s
theories of art.
. See Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie, II (Leipzig, 1924), pp. 240
ff.
. See Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, translated and annotated by Philip
McMahon (Princeton, 1956), pp. 32 ff. In subsequent references to this edition,
I shall give, in parentheses, the number of the fragment rather than of the page
on which it appears.
. He makes these distinctions in Plastik. Page numbers cited in parentheses in the
text are to the 1809 edition mentioned in note 14.
. In his opening observations on “Dramatic Art and Literature,” A. W. Schlegel
says that the wants to combine the theory and the history of the art he is
discussing. For his theory of art, see mainly his Vorlesungen iiber schéne Literatur
und Kunst, 1, Die Kunstlehre. References in parentheses in the text are to the
recent edition (Stuttgart, 1963).
20. In the first chapter of his History of Ancient Art, Winckelmann admits that art
probably began “with a sort of sculpture.” But he arranges the shaping of
different materials in a hierarchic as well as chronological order. Thus shaping
begins with clay, progresses to working in wood, then to working in ivory, and
ends up by carving in stone (see Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums
[Vienna, 1934], pp. 25, 30). Only carving in stone is considered full-fledged
sculpture.
ie Vasari several times articulates his well-known construction of history, as, for
example, in the introduction to the Vite (see Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters,
Sculptors and Architects, trans. A. B. Hinds [London and New York, 1980], I, p. 5).
May. In E. H. Gombrich, Tributes (Oxford, 1981). Gombrich’s criticism of Hegel is
best summed up in the lectures entitled “In search of cultural history,” reprinted
in E. H. Gombrich, Ideas and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (Oxford,
1979), pp. 24-59. See particularly pp. 28 ff.
W235. I shall quote the German text from the edition Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik,
(Berlin, 1835-1838), I-III, henceforth to be cited as Aesthetik; the English
translation by T. M. Knox is quoted from Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts (Oxford,
1975S), hereafter abbreviated as Fine Art.
24. Aesthetik, 1, pp. 4, 34; Fine Art, pp. 1, 25.
25: Aesthetik, I, p. 225; Fine Art, p. 175.
26. Aesthetik, 1, p. 11; Fine Art, p. 7.

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 Modern Theories of Art

27. Aesthetik, 1, p. 225; Fine Art, p. 175.

28. Aesthetik, 1, p. 12; Fine Art, p. 8.
ds). Aesthetik, 1, p. 393; Fine Art, p. 304.
30. In Theories of Art, pp. 360 ff.
Sil. See, for instance, H. R. Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt am Main,
1979), pp. 67 ff.
32) Titled, in German, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit.
33 Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker (1810-1812) deals mainly with
Greek mythology, but the very title of the large work indicates his awareness of
additional nations and their mythologies. For Creuzer, see below, pp. 233-238.
34. For an English translation of Schlegel’s “On the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians,” see The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, trans.
E. J. Millington (London, 1860), pp. 425-495.
35. Aesthetik, 1, p. 392; Fine Art, pp. 303-304.
36. Aesthetik, 1, p. 436; Fine Art, p. 338. An important source for Hegel’s studies of
Indian culture and art was the research of Wilhelm von Humboldt, but he used
also other works.
7k Aesthetik, 1, p. 456; Fine Art, p. 354.
38. Aesthetik, 1, p. 452 ff.; Fine Art, p-roon
3). Aesthetik, 1, p. 453; Fine Art, p. 351.
40. Aesthetik, 1, p. 463; Fine Art, p. 360.
41. Aesthetik, I, p. 461; Fine Art, p. 358. Hegel, obviously quoting from memory,
ascribes the story of the sounding colossi to Herodotus, but, as the English
translator notes, his source was probably Tacitus, Annals, Il, 61.
42. Aesthetik, 1, p. 464; Fine Art, pp. 360-361.
43. Aesthetik, Il, p. 3; Fine Art, p. 427.
44. Aesthetik, I], p. 21; Fine Art, p. 441.
45. Aesthetik, Il, p. 62; Fine Art, p. 473.
46. Virgin: Aesthetik, III, pp. 13 £.; Fine Art, pp. 800 ff. Dutch Seon: painting; Aesthetik,
III, pp. 120 ff; Fine Art, p. 886.
47. This has been suggested by Peter Szondi in Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie (Frank-
furt a. M., 1974), p. 424.
48. Aesthetik, Il, pp. 121 ff.; Fine Art, pp. 517-518.
49. Hegel emphasizes this mainly in his introduction to the discussion of the
romantic art form. See particularly Aesthetik, II, pp. 121 ff.; Fine Art, pp. 524 ff.
50. Aesthetik, Il, p. 133; Fine Art, p. 527.
Silk Aesthetik, II, p. 144; Fine Art, p. 532.
Ne Aesthetik, Il, p. 145; Fine Art, p. 536.
53% Aesthetik, II, p. 147; Fine Art, p. 538.
54. Aesthetik, I], 254 ff.; Fine Art, pp. 615-620.
55. Aesthetik, II, p. 268; Fine Art, p. 632.
56. This idea seems so important to Hegel that he stresses its originality. “This is a
point of supreme importance which I have not found emphasized anywhere.
.” See Aesthetik, II, p. 268; Fine Art, p. 632.

220
 Unity and Diversity of the Visual Arts

Dy/ Herder, Plastik (see above, note 14), p. 241.

58. Aesthetik, II, p- 354; Fine Art, p. 702.
oy): Aesthetik, Il, pp. 355 f.; Fine Art, p. 703.
60. Aesthetik, Il, p. 359; Fine Art, p. 705.
61. Aesthetik, II, p. 381; Fine Art, p. 723.
62. Aesthetik, Il, p. 386; Fine Art, p. 727.
63. Aesthetik, Il, p. 387; Fine Art, p. 728.
64. Aesthetik, II, pp. 392 ff.; Fine Art, p- W532.
65. Aesthetik, II, pp. 393 ff; Fine Art, p. 733:
66. Aesthetik, III, p. 7; Fine Art, p. 795.
67. Aesthetik, III, p. 15; Fine Art, p. 802.
68. Aesthetik, Il, p. 259; Fine Art, p. 626.
69. Aesthetik, III, pp. 89 ff.; Fine Art, p. 860.
70. Aesthetik, III, pp. 12 ff., 17 ff., 20; Fine Art, pp. 799, 803, 805.
Wi. Aesthetik, 111, p. 20; Fine Art, p. 805.
Wx Aesthetik, III, p- 43; Fine Art, p- 824.
7B. The literature on synaesthesia is large but unwieldy. Cf. the useful remarks in
Charles Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannebaum, The Measurement of Meaning
(Urbana, Ill., Chicago, and London, 1967), pp. 20-24. A thorough discussion of
synaesthesia from the point of view of art theory is still missing. Interesting
observations on the function of synaesthesia in symbolism may be found in
Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief (Boston, 1957).
74. The literature on the subject is not easily comprehended in its main lines. For
“harmony of the spheres,” see Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World
Harmony (Baltimore, 1963). For application of synaesthesia to the arts, see Albert
Wellek, “Renaissance- und Barock-Synaesthesie: Geschichte des Doppelempfin-
dens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift_ fiir Literaturwissenschaft
und Geistesgeschichte 9 (1931):534—584 (with further literature).
TS. For Poussin’s letter, see Theories of Art, p. 329.
76. I use the reprint (Paris, 1969). Page references will be given in the text. Because
in this work the paragraphs are numbered, | shall also give the number of the
paragraph referred to. The first figure in parentheses will represent the page
number, the second, after the semicolon, the number of the paragraph.
ide See above, pp. 158 ff.
78. Leonardo da Vinci: Treatise on Painting, translated by Philip McMahon (Princeton,
1956), pp. 7, 14 fh, ## 13, 26-28.
PD. Sometimes Chevreul speaks about the harmony of “beautiful colors” and “beau-
tiful sounds” (535;974). It is however obvious, I believe, that here too he has in
mind the arrangement of colors and sounds. The harmony and beauty resides in
the arrangement.
80. For Castel, see Wilton Mason, “Father Castel and His Color Clavecin,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17 (1958); 103-116. For modern attempts in the same
direction, see Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting: A Study in Comparative Ideas
from Turner to Schoenberg (New York, 1973), esp. pp. 121 ff.
 Modern Theories of Art

81. See my Light and Color in Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York, 1978), esp.
pp. 160 ff.
82. See below, pp. 348 ff.
83. See George P. Mras, Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art (Princeton, 1966), p. 37.
84. See, for instance, M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition (London, 1971), p. 51.
85. I am using the English translation by Walter Pach, in The Journal of Eugéne
Delacroix (New York, 1972), pp. 194-195.
86. The Journal of Delacroix, puoek.
87. Alois Riegl, Spatrémische Kunstindustrie (Vienna, 1927), pp. 32 ff. I abstain from
going into an analysis of the large literature (not always successfully dealing with
a very complex problem) that tries to elucidate Riegl’s concepts. Here I should
only like to point out when, at what stage of research and intellectual develop-
ment, the problem appeared.
88. Included in Bernard Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York,
1957), p. 63.
89. The Journal of Eugéne Delacroix, p. 538: entry of January 13, 1857.
90. Ibid., p. 537.
91; See below, pp. 362 ff.
O72.See René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, IV, The Later Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, 1983), p. 444.
93: These two stanzas were quoted by their author in an article on Richard Wagner’s
opera Tannhduser, published in March 1861. An English translation can be found
in Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan
Mayne (New York, 1964), pp. 111 ff. The quotation is on p. 116.
94. Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845-1862, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford,
1965), p. 51.
OS: Baudelaire, The Painter ofModern Life, p. 117.
96. The phrase appears in a lengthy study of Théophile Gautier that is not included
in any English translation of Baudelaire’s critical writings. See Charles Baudelaire,
Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, ed. H. Lemaitre (Paris, 1962), pp. 659 ff.
(the passage quoted being on p. 676).
Di See Lockspeiser, Music and Painting, p. 73.
98. For all these quotations, see Wellek, A History ofModern Criticism, 1V, p. 445.
99) The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 113 ff. The French text is in Curiosités esthétiques.
L’art romantique, p. 694.
100. Art in Paris, pp: 49—S0; Curiosités esthétiques, p- 108.
101. See below, pp. 363 ff, 375 ff.
102. See note 93.
103. The Painter of Modern Life, p. 114; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p. 694.
104. See above, pp. 187 ff, 193 ff.
105. For Viollet-le-Duc, see below, pp. 380 ff.
106. See H. W. Janson, /9th Century Sculpture (New York, 1985), pp. 126-127.

PLIOEG)
 Unity and Diversity of the Visual Arts

107. See Art in Paris 1845—1862, pp. 29 ff, 111 ff, 203 ff; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art
romantique, pp. 78 ff., 187 ff., 381 ff.
108. Art in Paris 1845-1862, p- 111; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p- 187.
109. Art in Paris 1845-1862, p. 204; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p- 383.
110. Art in Paris 1845-1862, p. 111; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p. 188.
lil, The letter is frequently published. | quote from the English translation of it in
Elizabeth Holt, A Documentary History of Art (Garden City, 1958), II, p. 35.
112. Art in Paris 1845-1862, p: 111; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p. 188.
ATS: Art in Paris 1845—1862, p- 205; Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p- 384.
114. Art in Paris 1845—1 862, p- 111, Curiosités esthétiques. L’art romantique, p: 189.
Ney, For the influence of German Romantic thought on French letters, see Albert
Beguin, L’Gme romantique et le réve: Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie francaise
(Paris, 1939). The few pages on Baudelaire (pp. 376-381) do not touch on our
subject.

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 A
The Symbol

“Iconology” has become a household word in modern critical language.

“Symbol” and “symbolism,” the terms most often used to indicate the
relationship of the visible to something that in itself is not seen, have
been so frequently and so carelessly employed that they have almost
ceased to have any meaning. I shall not here attempt to define these
heavily charged notions; yet I must explain in a few words why, to my
mind, the student of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reflections on
art should devote careful attention to what might be called the tradition
of symbolic reading of works of art.
The first reason for devoting a chapter to symbolism in this book is
simple enough. Between the early eighteenth and the late twentieth
century, symbolism played a central part in aesthetic reflections, and
this seems to be particularly true with regard to painting and sculpture.
When in our day one speaks of the predecessors of modern iconology,
one usually thinks of Renaissance mythography and emblematics (such
as Andrea Alciati’s work) and of Baroque manuals of the personifications
of abstract notions (such as Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia). There is little
doubt that these Renaissance and Baroque traditions did indeed pave
the way for a modern contemplation of pictorial symbolism. Yet the
reader following this presentation may get the impression that the
notion of iconology so popular in our century is a direct, unmediated

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continuation of that early humanistic legacy, in other words, that

modern scholars took up precisely were sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century authors left off. Such an impression, however, is not only
incorrect; it also deprives iconological thought of significant and pro-
ductive layers in its history. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
possessed a rich and continuous tradition of the symbolic reading of
images. There was also a great deal of questioning and soul searching as
to how one could be sure that these readings were correct or whether
they were the mere projections of a modern spectator. Many of the
connotations that so amply enrich the notion of “image” in modern
thought actually originated in the reflections of Enlightenment philoso-
phers, Romantic poets, and scholars of anthropology and religion in the
course of the nineteenth century.
The thinking of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century students and
artists about the symbolic dimension of works of art is important for us
not only because it happens to be part of the story we are telling. In
fact, they made a lasting contribution, placing the “image” in a new
light. Let us for the moment not worry about the scope of that notion.
Later we shall come back to the question of whether by “image”
nineteenth-century authors understood only paintings and statues, or
whether they also included what is perceived by the mind’s eye.
Whatever “image” may mean, by considering it as a symbol we discover
that it has a power that goes far beyond what is instantly perceived in
our experience. The symbolic image shows levels of reality that nor-
mally cannot be seen. The work of art becomes a testimony to an
absent—or supernatural—being. Earlier ages tried to come to terms
with this property of images by telling stories of miracles performed by
icons. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some secular notions
replace the miracle stories. The painting or the statue “show” the
artist’s personality, as if he were present; they are also believed to reveal
the wishes or memories of a collective subconsciousness. We need not
discuss these concepts themselves. What I should like to point out is
that to claim that the work of art can perform these functions is to
endow it with a particular power. The belief in such a power, hidden
in the image itself, is a lasting contribution of aesthetic reflection in the
centuries between the Baroque and our own time. It is another reason

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for studying carefully what these centuries had to say about the sym-
bolic function and might of art.

I]. WINCKELMANN

In more than one respect, Winckelmann marks the beginning of the

modern study of art.' This is also true for a new consideration of
subject matter and the symbolic dimension of works of art. What role
do symbolism and mythology play in the art of a period? What was
their significance for the art of his own time? Winckelmann was
concerned with these questions, and he returned to them at different
stages of his intellectual life. Already in his first treatise, Thoughts on the
Imitation of Greek Works of Art (1756), he deplores the fact that the
contemporary artist has no useful compendium on symbolism at his
disposal.* In one of his last works, Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders fiir die
Kunst (1766), he tried to provide the artist with just such a work.’ In its
aim, then, the latter work completely adheres to the line of traditional
art theory; ostensibly, it is meant as a help for the practicing artist, as
were similar manuals in the Renaissance. In its underlying approach,
however, it lays the foundations for a modern view of symbolism in the
figurative arts. In its achievements and failures it reflects the strengths
and weaknesses of Winckelmann’s aesthetics.
Subject matter plays a major role in Winckelmann’s views on art. It
is a criterion of value judgment; rendering the subject appropriately and
manifesting it clearly is the artist’s supreme goal. Winckelmann rejects
Dutch painting because it has a “merely sensory air.” He criticizes
rococo pictures because they are “paintings that mean nothing.”* His
aesthetics, it has frequently been said, is an “aesthetics of content”
(Gehaltsdsthetik). It is against this attitude to subject matter that we should
see his attempts to formulate a doctrine of allegory.
The signs of allegory, Winckelmann believes, are to be found far
beyond the confines of literary subject matter proper. Good taste has
recently deteriorated, we must infer from what he says, because of the
fashion of painting objects devoid of meaning. That taste can be re-
stored, however, by a thorough and devoted study of allegory. Certain

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 The Symbol

noble kinds of poetry find a parallel in visual allegories. The subject of

an ode, Winckelmann already declared in 1756, can be represented
visually only in an allegorical painting.” (In this context it is worthwhile
remembering, as Bengt Algot Sorensen has shown in a fine study, that
eighteenth-century, mainly English, views linked the ode with the
Sublime.)® In a broader sense, Winckelmann continually stressed the
importance of reason and rational understanding for art. “The brush
the artist uses should be dipped in reason,” he said in his first treatise.
“The artist should leave to thought more than what he shows the eye.”
What is an “allegory” in Winckelmann’s thought? He begins the
Versuch with a formal definition of the concept. It is thus particularly
surprising that our simple inquiry does not receive a simple answer. In
fact, Winckelmann gives, or at least implies, two different answers to
the question what is “‘allegory” or, more generally, the symbolic mode.
The main tendency of one answer is toward the past, of the other to
the future. And it is perhaps characteristic of Winckelmann’s singular
position in the history of his subject that he does not seem to perceive
the conflict between his two views.
In the very first sentences of the work, Winckelmann describes
allegory in linguistic terms. Taken in its broadest sense, he says, allegory
is a “suggestion of concepts by images, and thus it is a general language,
primarily of the artists. . . .” The term “allegory,” he reminds his
readers, originally meant “to say something that is different from what
one wants to indicate, that is, to aim somewhere else from where the
expression seems to go.” Later in the same opening paragraph, we learn
that the usage of the term was broadened, and now “we understand by
allegory everything that is indicated by pictures and signs.” Winckel-
mann does not tell us how he thinks these signs work or what makes
them intelligible to the spectator. A careful reader of his text cannot
help feeling, however, that he understands allegory as essentially based
on convention. To continue his metaphor, cultural inheritance taught
us the language, and therefore we are able to read and understand the
message.
This conclusion is supported by the modes to which Winckelmann
refers, the venerable tradition he acknowledges as his ancestor. He calls
pictorial symbolism a “science,” as did the great symbolists of the

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Renaissance, and from the past of that science he singles out “three
great heroes.” They are Pierio Valeriano, the mid-sixteenth century
humanist, Cesare Ripa, of whom we have spoken in an earlier stage of
this study, and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Boudard.’ These scholars
understood symbolism as a cultural, that is, a man-made, tradition,
based on deliberate, commonly known and accepted conventions. They
would all have agreed that you cannot read the symbols if you don’t
know the conventions on which they are based. This is also how
Winckelmann understood their legacy. Pierio Valeriano called his great
work on symbolism Hieroglyphica because he wished to explain the
symbolic signs of the Egyptians. The Egyptians, as the Greeks said,
invented allegory, and among them this form of expression was more
common than in other nations. The Egyptians called allegory their
“sacred language.” Again it follows from the overall context, though
Winckelmann does not say so expressly, that this “invented” language
(or script) is a convention, deliberately set up. Frequently Winckelmann
is critical of his predecessors. Cesare Ripa’s symbolism, for instance,
relies too much on literary sources, and does not draw sufficiently on
images. But this criticism does not call into question the basic assump-
tion underlying all interpretations, that is, that symbolism is a con-
vention.
In addition, however, Winckelmann holds yet another view of sym-
bolism, and, in some respects at least, that other view is the very
opposite of the first. ““Nature herself,” we are told, “was the teacher of
allegory, and this language is more appropriate to her than the signs
later invented by our thought” (p. 441). He also says that nature speaks
in allegories. How are we to understand this statement? The answer is
indicated in another definition of allegory. “Every allegorical sign or
picture should contain in itself the distinctive qualities of the thing
signified.” The simpler this relationship (of containing or displaying) is,
the better (p. 441). What this latter statement, if thought through
consistently, amounts to is a complete reversal of the understanding of
symbolism as a convention, and of the definition of allegory formerly
given. That former definition, as we remember, was based on an
assumption that the object that serves as a symbol and the idea that is

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 The Symbol

symbolized are altogether alien to each other. This, as we have just

seen, is what the word “allegory” means.
The new concept of allegory also implies a new way of reading
symbols. We have seen that you cannot read a symbol if you don’t
know the code in which it is written. Acquiring the code is a matter of
cultural achievement. The significance of the signs, or of the principles
governing that significance, is transmitted from one generation to an-
other, from one period to another. It naturally follows that some people
understand the signs, others do not. The Renaissance belief that only
the educated and the initiated are able to read the “sacred sign” is still
valid. The other concept of allegory reverses this belief. “Allegory
should therefore be intelligible by itself,’ Winckelmann says, “and
should not be in need of an inscription.”
How can we account for such a blatant contradiction? One may
suspect, as has indeed been suggested, a certain carelessness, or even
clumsiness, in the use of terminology. Winckelmann was not particu-
larly concerned with consistency in his use of terms. Though this may
be true, the contradiction we have just seen is too significant to be
explained away as a mistake. It is therefore important to note that
wherever Winckelmann speaks of an allegory that has a certain identity
with what it refers to—in his language, the symbol that contains in
itself the quality of what it symbolizes—he has images in mind. In
other words, in these cases he is thinking of allegories that address the
audience by means of visual experience. The image is not detached
from its contents, it carries its meaning within itself, and does not send
the spectator beyond what he visually experiences. Visual allegories, like
nature itself, are “true images of things” (p. 441).
Winckelmann writes for artists. Should we forget this basic fact, we
would quickly recall it by reading the Versuch einer Allegorie. With all his
antiquarian erudition and with all the subtle memories from ancient
literatures and arts that, whether explicitly stated or vaguely alluded to,
give such a rich texture to his text, he never forgets that he is
addressing his work to the creative artist. That the artist who shapes
new works always draws upon inherited tradition—whatever the pe-
riod in which he lives—is for Winckelmann a matter of course. But

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the learned Roman antiquarian also knows that for the creative artist
the task of shaping new symbolic visions is never done. There will always
be the need to create new symbols. It is therefore mandatory to inquire
how new allegories can be developed. In writing the Versuch, Winckel-
mann has this question uppermost in his mind. To be sure, in the
course of his work on allegory he summarizes a great deal of traditional
wisdom. He knows that the Renaissance tradition cast inherited images
into definite didactical patterns. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, we read early
in Winckelmann’s book, attained such wide fame that it became “the
artist’s Bible” (p. 476). Ripa, however, does not tell us how new
allegories should be fashioned. Here our author tries to fill the gap. He
outlines three principles that should govern any new creation in the
symoblic mode. Allegories, he says, should be simple, clear, and lovely.
Simplicity is not a new concept. We have already encountered it in
Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, and there, as we remember, he
considered simplicity as the supreme value and central achievement of
the classical age.” Now, one can perhaps understand what simplicity is
as a quality of style, in the rendering of figures or landscapes. But what
precisely constitutes the simplicity of an allegory? It consists, Winckel-
mann says, in “designing a picture so as to express the thing referred to
with as few signs as possible” (p. 484). Such simplicity is “like gold
without further addition.” Simplicity, then, is to express much by little.
The opposite is a sign of confused and immature conception.
Clarity, the second requirement, follows from simplicity, as Winck-
elmann believes (p. 485). Considered in the context of symbolic im-
agery, Clarity is a complex notion, not pertaining only to the making of
the work of art, and thus to the artist, but also to understanding it, and
thus to the spectator or audience. In the brief passage Winckelmann
devotes to clarity in Versuch einer Allegorie, he indeed switches from the
artist to the spectator. What is it that ensures the clarity of an
allegorical image? In an age so intensively concerned with hermeneutics,
one can now hardly refrain from formulating the problem more point-
edly: is an artistic symbol (or allegory) grasped intuitively, or does the
spectator have to learn the code in order to clearly understand what he
perceives in the work of art he is looking at? The question, implied by
Winckelmann’s wording, is no explicitly asked. So far as can be deter-

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mined from the text, the author does not see the dilemma clearly, or
else he wavers in his answer, he does not take a definite stand. The
clarity of symbolic images, Winckelmann says, “should be taken rela-
tively.” One cannot ask that a picture “be fully intelligible at a first
glance to a completely uneducated person,” he says as something self-
understood. The twofold qualification (“fully intelligible” and ‘“com-
pletely uneducated”’) shows that Winckelmann was not of one mind on
the central question of interpretation, a question he had not fully spelled
out. Nevertheless, it seems that he here tends to a reading of pictorial
symbols primarily as cultural signs. If you are not familiar with the
cultural code—if you are “uneducated,” that is—you cannot properly
grasp what you are seeing in the allegorical painting or statue. In the
very next sentence, however, Winckelmann makes a claim that seems
to contradict what he has just said. The allegorical picture will be clear,
we are told, “if it bears a close relation to what is to be represented.”
The example he adduces may astonish the modern student. The white
radishes in Guido Reni’s painting of Mary Magdalen “signify her strict
life” (p. 485). Everybody, Winckelmann obviously assumes, is familiar
with the harsh taste of white radishes and therefore intuitively applies
this knowledge as a reminder of Mary Magdalen’s “strict life.” It is,
Panofsky would say, the object known from “practical life” that seems
intuitively intelligible.
The third requirement, finally, is loveliness (pp. 485 ff.). This de-
mand, of course, is no specific to an allegorical or symbolic mode; we
ask loveliness of any work of art, whether or not symbolic. In a symbolic
work of art, however, the aim of loveliness is to make teaching pleasur-
able. This is particularly true, Winckelmann insists, for the visual
symbol. Literature can afford descriptions of horror and ugliness that
painting cannot.

le Lae SCIENCE OR IMYRATHOLOGY

The historian trying to follow the increasing concern with symbolism in

modern artistic reflection cannot disregard certain traditions of schol-
arship that, in a narrow sense, had little to do with the theory of art.

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First and foremost among these is the study of mythology, mainly

Greek but sometimes also of other cultures, as it blossomed particularly
during the period of Romanticism. The “‘science of mythology,” emerg-
ing in the last two decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of
the nineteenth century, articulated concepts of visual symbolism and
approaches to painting and sculpture that did not find comparable
expression in any other field of study or reflection. Some of these
concepts and approaches, we shall shortly see, became major factors in
the interpretation of art. In the present section, I shall first briefly
outline some of the major contributions the science of mythology made
to the theory of art; by way of example, I shall then analyze the
influence of some of the Romantic students of mythology on art
doctrines.
What is an artistic symbol, and how does it work? The question in
itself was not new; it had agitated the minds of artists and scholars
since the Renaissance. Yet in those centuries the question was perceived
in a somewhat vague, not fully articulate way. Some of the analytical
distinctions made by Romantic scholarship, particularly those setting
the symbol in art apart from symbolism in other fields of thought and
science, were new. It was these distinctions that later became important
components of a modern approach to the reading of an artistic image.
These distinctions, as well as the modern understanding of the work
of art as a symbolic expression, we should remember, were not pro-
pounded in the philosophical schools; rather they emerged from the
labors that some scholars invested in the study and interpretation of
mythographical texts and monuments. In our century, these early
scholars have sometimes been criticized for their logical inconsistency
and for hypotheses that, admittedly, are occasionally “wild.” However
that may be, their impact on thought on art was both profound and
extensive. The questions they asked electrified artists, critics, and audi-
ences. In posing these questions, and in pursuing certain lines of
thought in an attempt to answer them, these scholars became the
mouthpiece of subterranean trends that were to shape an important
part of the modern world.
Another contribution to the theory of art made by these scholars
was the transmitting to modern culture of a comprehensive repertory

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of distinct mythological images and visual symbols. This educational

activity, however, was a by-product rather than the major goal of the
Romantic scholars. What they sought was the “truth,” what they
achieved was the forming of the imagination of the modern world.
A final point I should like to stress is their emphasis on what was
collectively believed in ancient times. This may seem trivial to any
present-day student, but in the early nineteenth century it was of major
significance. The Romantic period was, as we all know, fascinated by
the unique, creative individual, by the “genius.” The art historian does
not have to be told what Romanticism contributed to the psychology
of the genius, and how it revolutionized the discovery of the individual
artist’s imagination and experience in his work. As opposed to the
“religion of genius,” to which we shall come back in the next chapter,
the scholars of the “Wissenschaft der Mythologie” emphasized the
beliefs of whole communities and cultures. In so doing they were, in
fact, preparing a great deal of the modern approach to art and its
symbols.

I. CREUZER

Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der
Griechen (Symbolics and Mythology of the Ancient Nations, Particularly
the Greeks) (Leipzig and Darmstadt, 1810-1812) was more than just
another learned book; it was a historic event. In it, Georg Friedrich
Creuzer (1771-1858), a professor of ancient literature at the University
of Heidelberg and a friend of Hegel’s, attempted to give a scientific
basis to the Neoplatonic reading of Greek mythology. Though his great
work (in four volumes) was soon dismissed by professional scholars,
especially philologists, its impact was far-reaching and deeply felt, and
it played an important part in the development of mythological studies.
Enthusiastically greeted by Schelling, it stirred a controversy that af-
fected several scholarly disciplines, and led to the rethinking of their
foundations. The struggle over Creuzer’s Symoblik was a cause célébre that
left its mark on the intellectual life of the nineteenth century.” The role
of this work in the articulation of views concerning pictorial symbolism,
though not sufficiently appreciated, is of significance.

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The first “book” of the Symbolik is devoted to a discourse on the

symbol in general. At the center of Creuzer’s views on the symbol
stands the image. By “image” he means what we perceive with our
“inner eye,” what we see in introspection, as well as the literary
metaphor; but he also means real, material images of the gods, statues
carved in stone or in wood. The visually perceived symbol is a focus of
religious imagery. A carved image of the god was placed in almost every
Greek temple. Reading the image, Creuzer believed, was among the
oldest functions of the priests. The teachers of ancient times, the priests,
had a kinship with the gods: they presented to the community, and
interpreted, the sacred images received (miraculously? Creuzer does not
say) from the gods themselves, or else they themselves shaped the
images of the visible gods (I, pp. 15 fia,
The symbol image, Creuzer believes, dwells in the zone of ambiguity
and conflict. This is so because the symbol is perceived by the soul, and
the soul itself dwells in that zone. As the soul “hovers” between the
world of ideas and the world of the senses, we read, so everything it
desires or achieves must partake of that “double nature” (I, p. 67). Such
hovering, the author stresses, is “the fate of the symbol.”
The “incongruence between essence and form” is a characteristic of
the symbol image. Now, that the symbol entails a tension, or even a
conflict, between the visible shape and the invisible content, between
the form that serves as a symbol and the idea that is symbolized by that
form—this had frequently been said in earlier periods. Nothing new
was added to that basic conception by Romantic thought. What is
characteristic of Creuzer is his endowment of this abstract cognition
with a live, immediate psychic urgency. The attentive reader of Creuz-
er’s discourse on the symbol often wonders whether the author’s
subject is a philosophical notion or an alarming experience in front of
an expressive, almost magical, work of art. To communicate this im-
mediate experience of the symbol, Creuzer has recourse to a famous
ancient treatise by Demetrios, known as On Style. Translating rather
freely, Creuzer says that “anything that is only portended is more
terrible than what, stripped of all veils, is presented to the eyes.
Therefore mystery doctrines are set forth in symbols, as night and
darkness” (I, pp. 68 ff.).""

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 The Symbol

“Darkness” cast a spell on Creuzer; he was enchanted with the

mystery and images of the night. This also applied to the historical and
cultural topics that, metaphorically, can be described as “dark.” He had
in mind particularly the mystery religions. In classical religion, he was
fascinated with the trends known as Orphic, Bacchic, Dionysian, and,
to a lesser degree, with some Oriental cults. What all these religious
trends have in common, he believed, was the aspiration for the ineffable.
The images they employed, therefore, show the intrinsic conflict of the
symbol in general. The symbol “wants to measure the immeasurable,
and to squeeze the divine into the narrow space of the human forms”
(I, p. 73). In the final event, this is a tragic enterprise; our author knows
that the attempt to utter the inexpressible is doomed to failure. The
striving to adequately symbolize the divine will eventually lead to the
destruction of the symbol itself. “Here,” he writes, “the ineffable
prevails that, seeking expression, will by the infinite power of its essence
ultimately explode the terrestrial form that is too weak a vessel.”
Exploding the vessel is obviously the end of symbolizing. “Herewith the
clarity of looking is itself destroyed, and only speechless wondering
remains” (I, p. 73).
Symbols, nevertheless, exist. How are we to account for them? The
symbol is there, it can be experienced — this is the essence of Creuzer’s
teaching — because we are able to perceive it intuitively, without first
breaking it up into its individual components. It is an essential property
of expression by means of images that it proceeds differently from
analytical separation. It gives, he says, “a unique and undivided” whole.
Whereas analytical reason dissects the object it wishes to present into
its component parts, assembles the individual characteristics, and ad-
duces them successively as a series of features, the intuitive mode
presents all at once. “In a simple glance,”Creuzer writes, “in one stroke
the intuition is completed” (I, p. 66).
The symbol, our author claims, is “the root of all expression by
images” (I, p. 80). This he wishes to show by comparing the symbol, as
he understands it, with the other major products, or forms, of “‘icon-
ism.”'? He thus compares symbol with allegory. In what he calls
“allegory,” an essential distinction remains between the sensory form
and the idea; in the “symbol,” they are fused. In allegory, to use his

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own wording, there is “a reference to a general notion, the symbol is

the sense-perceived, embodied idea itself.” So close are Creuzer’s words
to the time-hallowed terms employed in Christological doctrine that
one feels certain our author was aware of the powerful historical and
theological connotations he was evoking. In allegory, we read, there is
“substitution” (Stellvertretung), in the symbol the concept itself “de-
scended into this world of bodies, and in the image (Bild) we see the
notion itself and directly” (I, p. 83).
The problem of the symbol is not one of formal structure and shape;
it is also, and perhaps primarily, that of reading. In other words, the
symbol lives, and acts out its possibilities, in what it does to the
audience and in how it affects the spectator. The difference between
the two modes of symbolizing is also reflected in the ways people read
the symbolic image. In reading allegory, Creuzer says, there is “more
freedom,” the impulse to play—that is, the urge to try out different
possibilities of interpretation—‘“hovers around the idea,” before we
settle on a definite solution. Figuring out what an allegory means is the
free act of the interpreting beholder. Something altogether different
occurs when we look at what Creuzer calls the “symbol.” In writing
about how the symbol affects us, Creuzer abounds in metaphors of
dominance and compulsion. His language shows how deeply he believed
that man is at the mercy of the symbol. The play-drive has disappeared,
and now we are under the symbol’s spell. Our soul is deeply stirred by
the symbolic image we are regarding. So profound is the impact of the
symbol that, in Creuzer’s words, “the necessity of nature [here] prevails
upon us” (I, p. 64). We do not know precisely how the symbolic image
dominates our soul and mind, but we deeply feel that it does. The
image was not produced in order to dominate us, but the power of
revelation contained in it makes it inexorable. “Just as nature in her
unchanging laws silently reigns, so rules, silently and involuntarily, as it
were, an eternal truth in that significant image.” Creuzer calls this
compelling power of the image “the natural language of the symbolic”
(I, p. 85).
What were Creuzer’s sources for his doctrine of the visual symbol?
It has been claimed that he revived the Neoplatonic approach to ancient
religion.'? This seems to be particularly true for what he says about the

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symbol that is intuitively perceived. He derived a great deal from the

major text of ancient Neoplatonism, Plotinus’s work. Already compara-
tively early in his life, in 1805, Creuzer had translated long passages
from Plotinus.'* He must have been particularly impressed by what
Plotinus says about Egyptian hieroglyphs as images of thought. As we
know, Plotinus explained the hieroglyphs as the images of ideas. They
show, in his own words, “‘the absence of discursiveness in the Intellec-
tual Realm. For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a
distinct image. . .” (V,8,6).'° Creuzer felt the affinity of the hieroglyph
to the visual arts. In the Symbolik (I, p. 321), he treats hieroglyphs,
conceived as ideographic images, as part of sculpture.
The mythological tradition in Romantic scholarship, represented by
Creuzer (and in which he played a significant part), placed art on a high
metaphysical level. These students of ancient mythologies extolled the
image far beyond the merely aesthetic object or the didactic device;
they tried to understand and to reveal the magic powers with which
the painting and the statue are endowed. In thus viewing the image,
these scholars paved the way for what was to be called the “religion of
art.” The present-day historian wonders, however, how the secure
metaphysical position of the image derives from Creuzer’s doctrine. To
use an old Platonic term, did he indeed “‘save”’ art?
In his doctrine of the symbol, Creuzer is a radical. He exposes the
inherent conflicts and he pushes the clash between the contrasting
tendencies to an extreme point. Yet we have also seen that he was
aware of the danger for the image, and for the “clarity of vision,” that
the attempt “to measure the immeasurable” entails. When Creuzer
comes to actual art, he looks for a “reconciliation,” to use Hegel’s term,
between the ineffable and the form, he tries to find a way to bridge the
total “incongruence” between spirit and matter.
In the final analysis, Creuzer seems to believe, the very condition
necessary for the coming into being of an expressive, symbolizing work
of art is the mitigation of the conflict between the visible and the
invisible, between the two contrasting features of the symbol. For the
radical philosopher of mythology there is no way to soften the clash.
The student of art sees this differently. If the symbolic drive restricts
itself and, as Creuzer says, “modestly keeps to a delicate middle line

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between spirit and nature,” it will be able to make the divine visible
“to a certain degree” (gewissermassen) (I, p. 74). The symbolic image—
obviously he has the image of the divine in mind—draws, “with
irresistible force,” the spectator to itself, ineluctably it “touches our
soul,” as does the World Spirit itself. In rather poetic language more
suitable to a mystic visionary than a sober professor, he says that what
causes that image to act is “the exuberance of upwelling ideas.” But
here, in the image, the “essence” does not strive at “boundless super-
abundance”; rather, it yields to form, it permeates and animates it. This
yielding, a solving of the conflict between the infinite and the finite,
Creuzer conceives as a purification. “From the purification of the
image-realm (Bildliches), on the one hand, and from the voluntary re-
nunciation of the boundless, on the other, there blossoms forth the
most beautiful fruit of all symbolism, the symbol of the god. That
symbol of the god marvellously combines the beauty of form with the
highest abundance of essence. Since it occurred in most perfect form in
Greek sculpture, it may be called the plastic symbol” (I, pp. 74 f.).
We shall not here attempt to assess in detail whether or not the
“reconciliation” Creuzer suggests is a valid solution. The philosopher
may have his doubts as to whether the Romantic “mythologist,” as
Friedrich Creuzer called himself, actually showed how the incongruence
inherent in the symbol can be overcome. But whatever the philosophical
weaknesses, the mythological school, and quite particularly Creuzer,
became a significant factor in shaping ideas on the image. Though his
name is not known to many artists and critics, the ideas he introduced
into modern thought on the visual arts have enjoyed a long and
powerful life.

2. BACHOFEN

Bachofen’s An Essay on Ancient Mortuary Symbolism (Versuch iiber die Graber-

symbolik der Alten) appeared in 1859, almost fifty years after the first
volume of Creuzer’s Symbolik. This half-century was a productive time
for mythological research, but the direction it took led away from
Creuzer’s mystical Neoplatonism. The study of the Greek gods became
the concern of academic institutions. There is no denying that, under

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the new tutelage, the scholarship improved, the evidence was more
carefully and cautiously weighed, and the conclusions reached brought
scholarship closer to “truth.” Yet it is also true that, as the flights of
fancy sometimes characteristic of Creuzer and his predecessors were
restrained by responsible scholarship, the Greek gods became less fasci-
nating to artists. Mythological symbolism was slowly losing its hold on
the formation of art theoretical concepts.
Besides the main trend of mythological scholarship, however, another
tradition of reading mythical symbols was alive throughout the nine-
teenth century. As far as strict scholarly consistency is concerned, that
other tradition may have been less responsible than the learning of the
professors, and the conclusions it drew from the evidence could not
always be fully supported. But it was charged with imagination and
retained something of the vivid belief that hidden mysteries were
revealed, or in some ways at least indicated, in the appearances of the
ancient gods and in the classical monuments portraying them. That was
a modern mythography, breathing something of the late antique and
sixteenth-century spirit. This slightly esoteric mythography of the nine-
teenth century is not only an important testimony to the culture of that
time; it has much to say about what was thought and believed about
the art and the image. Bachofen well represents this kind of myth-
ological scholarship in the modern world.
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887), the son of an old Basle family
of wealthy manufacturers, was a colorful figure. His life, and particularly
his “afterlife,” were eventful. A jurist and professor of Roman law as a
young man, he left the university early to devote himself to studies, and
other activities, that are not easily placed in a specific academic pigeon-
hole. Bachofen had the rare luck of being discovered twice. Both
“revivals,” if this is the right word, were focused on his famous work
Mother Right (1861). Friedrich Engels drew important conclusions from
Bachofen’s picture of primitive society for his own view of the historical
process as spelled out in The Origin of the Family (1884). Later, in the
1920s and 1930s, German right-wing thought tried to appropriate Bach-
ofen unto itself.'® But his rediscovery in the twentieth century was the
act of a group of creative artists and literary men. That it was precisely
artists and writers who rediscovered him was, one feels, not a matter of

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chance. Bachofen, to quote Joseph Campbell, “thas a great deal to say to

artists, writers, searchers of the psyche, and, in fact, anyone aware of
the enigmatic influence of symbols in the structuring and moving of
lives.”!’ If Bachofen is mentioned today, it is because his name is
attached to a theory of social development that claims that the first
period in human history was matriarchal. In the present context, I shall
completely disregard this theory to considering Bachofen only as a
particularly significant witness to the esoteric mythological tradition;
we shall try to see what it was in that tradition that so powerfully
appealed to artists and art critics. I shall therefore comment only on his
Essay on Ancient Mortuary Symbolism.
Bachofen was a prophet of the creative imagination. He read mythol-
ogy as a residue of that imagination. In 1854, he wrote an autobio-
graphic sketch for his teacher, the great jurist and historian of law
Friedrich Karl von Savigny, and in it he explained what fascinated him
in the tombs. One passage, at least, is worth full quotation.
Ought I, by way of explaining my interest in the ancient tombs, to speak of
epigraphy and epigrammatics and many other related fields? I prefer to think
of the enjoyment I have derived from my visits to tombs. There are two roads
to knowledge—the longer, slower, more arduous road of rational combina-
tion and the shorter path of the imagination, traversed with the force and
swiftness of electricity. Aroused by direct contact with the ancient remains,
the imagination grasps the truth at one stroke, without intermediary links.
The knowledge acquired in this second way is infinitely more living and
colorful than the products of the understanding (Verstand). a.

In this brief passage we still clearly perceive the echo of Creuzer’s

voice, but we also see that the intervening decades had brought about a
change in emphasis that amounts to a significant shift in outlook.
Bachofen juxtaposes learning (epigraphy, epigrammatics) to the direct
experience, and he clearly rejects the former in favor of the latter.
Creuzer did not yet envisage a clash between erudite scholarship and
immediate experience, though the conflict was adumbrated in his thought.
Moreover, by explicitly making “enjoyment” the major justification for
looking at the tombs Bachofen betrays an aesthetic attitude that was
not yet within Creuzer’s intellectual grasp. But what does Bachofen
look for in these tombs? What does he hope to find in their murals?

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 The Symbol

The walls of the columbarium of the Villa Pamphili, he believed,

presented to the inquirer the record of an ancient nature religion. That
record was written in symbols, and the symbolism has not yet been
deciphered. But to find the key to these secrets, one has to take the
images seriously. Bachofen was impatient with the claim—so fre-
quently made by twentieth-century spectators—that forms and motifs
we do not understand and that strike us as strange derive from the
sheer will to ornament. “Where we [nowadays] are accustomed to see
artistic caprice, at most an intention to decorate, the earliest human
beings required a thought expressed in symbols. . . . We are not yet
advanced far enough to read directly from the page, the symbolic
language of the ancients like a script with present-day characters.” 4
Now, are Bachofen’s studies in Greek and Roman sepulchral symbol-
ism regular iconographic essays? In other words, does he propose to
find out what people at a given time and in a given culture expressed
by certain symbols? No doubt he was affected by the great iconographic
tradition, but he aimed at something else. The symbols he was trying to
decipher were not just another cultural product, just as important and
just as limited as so many other products of cultures. Bachofen held
that the columbarium murals contained the records of a primary and
universal language of symbols. In decoding the meanings of the murals,
he writes, ‘‘I attempt to disclose a meaning far beyond the sphere of art
and archaeology.” The symbolism of these tombs, he continues,

rooted in the oldest intuitions of our race, passed unchanged, though

ultimately no longer understood, into the era of waning paganism, and even
the new era opened by the Incarnation of Christ. . . . The symbol of the egg
provides a remarkable example of the transcending of time, while the motif of
Ocnus the rope plaiter passes beyond national barriers and is encountered in
Egypt, Asia, Greece, and Italy.”

And as if this were not already sufficiently clear, he adds: “It is this
character of permanence that makes the ancient tombs so very mean-
ingful.” Painted images as the universal and eternal records of the
human soul—one can understand why the historians shuddered, and
why the artists rejoiced.
To understand how Bachofen looked at ancient images, it is perhaps

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best to have a look at his reading of one scene, Ocnus the rope plaiter.
We know of Ocnus from several ancient sources belonging mainly to
late Antiquity, the period that looked for hidden meanings in objects as
well as in stories. Ocnus repents in Hades, punished by having to twist
a rope of straw that is continually consumed by an ass. It is this subject
that is represented on one of the murals in the tomb structure of the
Villa Pamphili.
Bachofen starts with the image. The picture, he says, is “hiero-
glyph.” * This probably means that it expresses an idea in a form that
is both esoteric and concise. Myth, that is, the story told, is the
explanation—the “exegesis,” as he says—of the visual symbol. The
image, it follows, comes before the story; it represents a more primor-
dial layer than either the myth or the text. Trying to record and explain
what we see, we have to stick to the visible. Therefore, “the meaning
can only be physical.” It is in this line of thought that Bachofen declares
“Ocnus the rope plaiter is a nature symbol.” His support of this claim
is characteristic.
The meaning of rope plaiting, he is sure, cannot be doubted for one
moment. “Rope plaiting is frequently a symbolic action, based on the
same conceptions as the spinning and weaving of the great mothers.
The symbol of spinning and weaving represents the creative, formative
power of nature.” Though he naturally does not find in ancient litera-
ture an explicit definition of plaiting as the symbol of the creative
power, his wide and profound erudition allows him to adduce many
examples from Greek mythology in which plaiting can be understood
as the process of shaping, of casting the amorphic into articulate form.
The destructive power of nature is represented by an animal, the
donkey that eats Ocnus’s rope. That this beast is specifically a donkey
strikes our author as particularly meaningful. In Antiquity, as Bachofen’s
wide learning tells him once again, the ass is the “phallic” beast, the
typical representative of primary natural urges. Basing himself on Plu-
tarch as well as on several mythological stories, he also describes the ass
as the beast of the swamp. Moreover, the howling and fury so typical
of it “confirm the demonic destructive nature of the ass.’ 7?
The conclusion Bachofen derives from what he sees in the sepulchral
mural is that in nature “Two forces are locked in eternal battle.” The

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 The Symbol

meaning of the two poles, to put it briefly, is that “Creation is an art;

destruction is the work of brute force. Creation rests in the human
hand; destruction is attributed to the demonic animal nature.”*?
We shall not here follow the author’s enthralling explorations of the
Ocnus story in ancient religions. Nor can we trace his impact on some
modern psychological theories. (Jung’s notion of “archetypes” has many
affinities with Bachofen’s doctrine of the symbol.) In the present con-
text we should like only to analyze briefly how Bachofen looks at the
ancient pictures, and on what he focuses his attention. In the following
comments we are not studying Bachofen’s scholarly “method”; rather
we are concerned with what his procedures may disclose about the
theory of art implied in the nineteenth-century tradition of esoteric
mythology-research and interpretation. | shall briefly summarize four
issues in Bachofen’s study of ancient art that seem to me important for
understanding the theory of art that underlies his studies.
(1) “Nature symbol” (Natursymbol) is one of Bachofen’s expressions.
It is a notion that does not seem to occur, as a conventional term, in
earlier mythological literature; it is also not meant as a symbol for
“nature.” It refers, as has been suggested,”* to the motif or to the
painting as a whole. To stick to our example, the juxtaposition of Ocnus
plaiting the rope and the ass eating it up together form a “nature
symbol.” This, we are to understand (though Bachofen nowhere explic-
itly says so), is not a conventional sign or attribute. If we are not
mistaken, the notion of symbol is here used in a very free and vague
way. It does not exclude the spontaneous creation of images and the
forming of new relationships between the features and motifs of an
image. “‘Nature symbol” is a notion that has been further developed,
though under different names, in twentieth-century thought.
(2) Of particular interest is Bachofen’s idea of personification. The
forces of nature, recognized as such, are not represented in abstract
forms but become personifications. In this intellectual world, personifi-
cation has two aspects. On the one hand, the term indicates that
Bachofen himself is not concerned with the individual, that he is not
interested in portraiture. Rather he looks for the typical. Already in
1851, speaking of his trip to Greece, he said that what he wishes to
study are “species” (Arten) rather than individual figures or single works

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of art. He also invented, though he rarely used, a notion he called

“‘Elementarismus” to indicate concentration on the type. Personification
is a way of presenting the generic to the eye. On the other hand,
personification assures that the generic will not stay abstract, that it will
be real in the sense that it is available to the spectator’s direct experi-
ence. The reality of personification is of a particular kind: it is a creation
of the mind that assumes sensory qualities. Ocnus as the personification
of art and the ass as an embodiment of the beastly in nature are cases
in point.
(3) Unusual in mythological as well as in archaeological literature is
Bachofen’s emphasis on the psychological expression of the figures
portrayed in the ancient murals, and of the moods these paintings
convey. What we have in mind is expression in the modern sense of
the term, that is, a mood or an emotional state that is manifested, not
by employing conventional attributes but by an overall quality that is
hard to pin down to this or that detail. This is how Bachofen opens his
discussion of the mural in the Villa Pamphili sepulcher:

A bearded man is shown sitting in the open country. . . . His attitude

suggests repose after the day’s work, and a profound earnestness. . . . The
whole scene, the old man, the animal, the farm, is bathed in the tranquillity of
evening. Deep stillness prevails. The silence of the tomb seems infused into
the picture.”°

Traditional studies of mythology made extensive use of ancient

monuments, but they had little use for the moods conveyed by these
paintings. Whatever art historical writings existed at his time also paid
more limited attention to the overall expression. Such consideration of
the expressive quality as we find in Bachofen’s work may be considered
an element of a theory of art.
(4) What is the mythological symbol meant to show, one finally asks.
The aim is to understand the ideas of Antiquity as a whole, and to grasp
them intuitively. Quoting Plutarch once again, Bachofen claims that in
mythological images the initiate sees, “as in a mirror, the more sublime
truths of the mysteries.” These truths are expressed in the sepulchral
murals, they are conveyed, as he says, in “the language of the tombs.”
Here Bachofen once again extols the power of the image, a power that

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remains unmatched by any other medium. Equating “symbol” and

“image,” he claims that

Human language is too feeble to convey all the thoughts aroused by the
alternation of life and death and the sublime hopes of the initiate. Only the
[static] symbol and the related myth can meet this higher need. The symbol
awakens intimations; speech can only explain. The symbol plucks all the
strings of the human spirit at once; speech is compelled to take up a single
thought at a time. The symbol strikes its roots in the most secret depths of
the soul; language skims over the surface of the understanding like a soft
breeze. The symbol aims inward; language outward.”°

The study of mythology eventually flows into a psychological theory

of ancient painting.

[US CELE Ss) MBOLIC VANDSCAPRE

I. ROMANTIC CONCERN WITH LANDSCAPE

In the preceding pages we have been following, if only in outline, a

historical process that in the century between Winckelmann and Bach-
ofen transformed thought on painting and sculpture. This process, or at
least some of its major aspects, can be described as a secularization of
sorts: conventional symbolism, deriving from firmly established, time-
honored signs and attributes, was being gradually replaced by the
expression of moods and emotions that could be grasped directly by the
spectator. The belief that some symbols can be understood without
relying on an acquaintance with cultural codes permeated the depiction
and reading of mythological figures and themes. Naturally it also af-
fected other fields of study and creation. It goes without saying that
these new views of the reading of symbolic shapes involved, or were
determined by, significant changes in subject matter. As far as actual
painting is concerned, it is well known that emphasis was placed on
new themes. This is also true for theoretical reflection. Landscape
painting was among the new themes of art theory, together with the
possibilities of intuitive symbolism that it offered. Reading early nine-
teenth-century theory of landscape painting, one senses the writers’

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fascination with this newly discovered country, its unknown vistas and
horizons; one also watches, as in a sharply focused mirror, the unfolding
of the major problems of Romantic thought.
Concern with landscape painting, it is well known, did not begin
with Romantic art theory. In the first volume of this book, I have
commented briefly on the conceptual categories of landscape painting
as they emerged between the Renaissance and classicist academism.”’
Here I can therefore concentrate on the period that begins with the
late eighteenth century.
Around the turn of the century, landscape fascinated the minds of
artists, philosophers, and students of literature. While to some extent
this was also true of natural vistas (seas, mountains), interest was mainly
concentrated on pictorial renderings. | shall select a few examples of
this concern with landscape painting, discussing aspects that throw
some light on the emergence of a new symbolism. I shall start with
what literary men and philosophers had to say and will then come to
the painters.
In the traditional hierarchy of pictorial genres, landscape painting
occupied a low rung of the ladder. In eighteenth-century workshops,
the status of landscape painting was that inherited from earlier genera-
tions, as we have seen in Gerard de Lairesse’s treatise on painting (see
above, pp. 67 ff.). Writing at the end of the century, Lessing does not
seem to have doubted the validity of this schema. The representation of
nature is not valuable in itself. Only if it passes through the filter of
poetic imitation does it acquire value. In landscape, Lessing notes, there
is no ideal beauty.”®
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, from 1802 to 1804,
Friedrich Schlegel composed his Description of Paintings in Paris and the
Netherlands, also commenting on the general nature of landscape painting.
Landscape, he remarks, was known first as the background of symbolic
paintings (he is obviously referring to religious art), but it “is in its
proper sphere and endowed with its full force of expression when thus
introduced alone.” Without symbolism, usually provided by some hg-
ures recalling sacred events, “landscape and still-life painting becomes a
mere exercise of mechanical facility in surmounting difficulties, or even
declines into a discordant and worthless medium for the bare copying

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of visible and sensible charms.”?? In Schlegel’s comments one clearly

observes the ambivalence characteristic of the Romantic position. On
the one hand, he clings to the dogma according to which landscape as
such is without inherent value; on the other, he senses that it can carry
powerful expression. If landscape painting is to be a branch of painting
in its own right, Schlegel prefers “a simple confined style,” like that of
the Dutch landscape painter Ruysdael.
At the same time the Description was composed, the young philoso-
pher F. W. J. Schelling was delivering his lectures on the philosophy of
art (Philosophie der Kunst) in Jena (1802-03), and repeated them shortly
afterwards (1804—05) in Wiirzburg. In the course of these lectures, he
too made some comments on landscape painting. Schelling does not
rate landscape painting any higher than does the traditional hierarchy
of pictorial genres. However, he interprets it in a new way and stresses
aspects that anticipate future developments in art theory. Among the
philosophers it was Schelling who stressed that landscape painting is a
“subjective” art form. In the landscape, he says, ‘only subjective repre-
sentation is possible, because the landscape has reality only in the
spectator’s eye.” 30 Gone, then, is the traditional idea of correctness,
and of measuring nature. Landscape painting, it turns out, is elevated
above nature, and thus, perhaps paradoxically, becomes a specifically
human type of painting. It necessarily focuses on empirical reality, as
Schelling admits. But the mountains and valleys, the rivers and forests
and skies that compose it are only a “cover” (Hiille). In a landscape
painting that is a great work of art the inner core is able to shine
through. “The true object, the idea, remains without shape,” he says.
How, then, can a painting convey that idea? In a great landscape
painting, the spectator becomes an active partner in bringing about the
effect achieved by the work of art. “It depends on the beholder,” our
philosopher asserts, “to pick it [the idea] out from the misty and
shapeless” reality, which is what the landscape painting directly shows.
Among artists and art critics, new interest in the landscape picture
stirred even earlier. Following the process of painters’ changing atti-
tudes to landscape, one witnesses the gradual crystallization of a modern
view of art. The Swiss painter, poet, and critic Salomon Gessner (1730—
1788), who published his Brief iiber die Landschaftsmalerey an Herrn Fusslin
 Modern Theories of Art

(Letter on Landscape Painting to Mr. Fuseli) in 1770, still belonged to

the period of classicism. Classicism, as we know, did not give pride of
place to landscape painting, and this is still Gessner’s explicit opinion.
His practical attitude is shaped by the modes of thought prevailing in
the workshops. He looks to other artists, particularly great artists of the
past, for “‘models.” Thus, he tells his reader, he had copied, and learned
from, Claude Lorrain’s dusky distances, from Philips Wouwerman’s
soft, flowing hills, and from Claesz Berchem’s rocky grounds (note the
ecclectic combination of painters belonging to different schools and
traditions). His attention to details and isolated motifs that can provide
models for imitation also extends to nature, such as the trunk of a tree,
or even only a part of it. Salomon Gessner is probably the last painter
to repeat Cennino Cennini’s advice to carefully portray a piece of stone
“when you wish to paint a mountain.” 2
For our present discussion it is more important to note that, in spite
of Gessner’s traditional outlook, some types of landscapes, particularly
what he calls “ideal” landscapes, acquire a utopian quality in his mind.
Nature as the blissful environment of innocent man: this is the message
at least one type of landscape painting conveys. It was this view that in
the early nineteenth century provoked sharp criticism. “Where are
there shepherds like these?” sarcastically asked the poet and painter
Friedrich Miiller.*? Salomon Gessner, it has occasionally been noted, did
not excel by his analytical mind, but his influence on painters and
writers on art theory was wide and stimulating. _
The Swiss aesthetician J. G. Sulzer (1720-1779) belonged entirely to
the world of classicism (he was only two years younger than Winckel-
mann). It is not surprising that he considered landscape a rather
primitive kind of painting. Very attentive observation of lifeless nature,
he thought, is the “first step man takes to reach understanding and a
proper disposition of mind.” In his article entitled “Landscape,” * > he
not only collected a considerable amount of information about land-
scape painting in modern times (adducing the names of the artists who
excelled in this field), but he also stressed the close connection between
nature and the character (Gemiit) of man. Even in nature itself, when
not represented in pictures, landscapes are able to evoke aesthetic
experiences in the spectator. Noble feelings stir our souls when we look

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at certain vistas, while other views of nature fill us with fear and
trembling. Painting therefore, he concludes, finds in natural landscape
the materials, as it were, “to affect the dispositions of men.” Landscape
painting thus becomes the art of producing moods. In Sulzer’s article
this notion is only intimated, but the line of thought cannot be mis-
taken. A series of landscape paintings, in which appropriate figures of
men and beasts are seen, “would be a true orbis pictus that would
‘

provide to youth and to more mature age all the useful basic notions
(Grundbegriffe), and would tune each string of the mind (Gemiit) to its
proper tone.”
A climax in the discussion of the nature and position of landscape
painting is reached in an article, “Uber die Landschaftsmalerei” (On
Landscape Painting), published in 1803. The author, Karl Ludwig Fer-
now, was not himself a painter, but what he said can be considered a
true reflection of the artistic thought of his time. A friend and biogra-
pher of Asmus Jacob Carstens, Fernow also attentively listened to what
other artists had to say. The article on landscape painting is dedicated
to another painter, Johann Christian Reinhart, who was also a friend of
the author. Addressing Reinhart, Fernow writes that the article is “the
fruit of many instructive hours I spent, in contemplation and in conver-
sation, in your workshop, among your works, studies, and sketches.” Me
Fernow distinguishes between two types of landscape painting:
“prospect painting,” and the “representation of ideal nature scenes.”
Only the latter can be considered art. But Fernow is too much rooted
in neoclassical thought to approach landscape painting with an alto-
gether open mind. Reading his article, one still clearly senses the
tyranny of the belief that the human figure is the only truly appropriate
subject of painting. The “landscape in itself,” says Fernow, “is to be
considered as an empty scene.” The more important the figures popu-
lating the scene, and the more poetically they are treated by the painter,
“the greater [also] the interest in the landscape.”*° He tries to intro-
duce a hierarchy of types within landscape painting itself. The lowest
type is found in Dutch painting. Here, he believes, the natural view
represented is never treated in a “poetic” spirit. The next type is
represented by Swiss and Scottish landscapes. In the former, nature is
grandiose (this is particularly true for mountain pieces); the latter are

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populated, and enlivened, by Ossianic myths. In Fernow’s views of both

Swiss and Scottish landscapes, one perceives, as has been observed, the
impact of the Sturm und Drang movement and of the late eighteenth-
century fascination with the Sublime.*© The third and highest type of
landscape is provided by the South, mainly Italy. Here we not only see
nature in its full amplitude, in harmoniously soft color, but ennobled by
the ruins of classical temples, aqueducts, and tombs.
While Fernow’s hierarchy of landscape types is essentially informed
by neoclassical thought, another aspect of his attitude to landscape
indicates a possible clash between that thought and fascination with the
Sublime. Fernow distinguishes between what he terms two “styles” of
landscape painting, the “beautiful” and the “great.” In the beautiful
style, the shapes and colors are always endowed with “grace and
charm.” In the great style, nature appears as a “great, active power
either in the menacing seriousness of an approaching storm . . . or in
the traces of the destructive effects it leaves behind.”
The expressive qualities of landscape are not explicitly treated by
Fernow, but they underlie most of his discussion of this art form. How
does landscape produce a mood? This is the question that occupies his
mind. Sometimes he tries to apply to the analysis of landscape painting
categories developed for the discussion of figural art. Thus, to produce
an aesthetic mood, he believes, a landscape must have “character.” By
this he means the configuration of permanent features (the structure of
the ground, vegetation, buildings), these features being seen under
changing conditions (light, seasons). With regard to character, one
understands, landscape painting is not different from figure painting. In
figure painting, too, beauty depends on the figure’s character. *’
In the present context, however, the means by which the painter of
landscapes evokes certain moods are not as important as the very fact
that landscape painting is a mood-creating art form. Fernow is over-
come by emotion when he sees remarkable sights in nature as well.?®
He understands landscape painting as an art form that aims, though
maybe only implicitly, at shaping moods. It is precisely in this respect
that he compares landscape painting with that most abstract of arts,
music. “‘One is in the habit of comparing landscape painting to music,”
he writes in the introduction to his Rémische Studien. He goes on to stress

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the difference between the two. What he accepts is only the similarity
of effect they have on the spectator. “This comparison,” we read
further in the introduction, is based on “the similarity of the effects
that colors and tones produce, both individually on the sensations
(Empfindungen) and, in harmonic association, on the feelings (Gefiihl).”” A
landscape painting, like a piece of music, sets our mood, and it does so
even before our reason is able to grasp what is represented or how the
effect is achieved.
In seeing landscape painting as an almost abstract mood-producing
art form, and in comparing it with music, a great deal of nineteenth-
and even twentieth-century thought on art is anticipated.
The first decade or so of the nineteenth century saw a further
deepening of artists’ concern with landscape painting, and, particularly,
further explorations of the power to produce moods that seemed
inherent in this art form. The spectator’s expectations and attitudes
were also considered. Much depends on the “disposition of mind”
(Gemiitsbeschaffenheit) with which the spectator approaches a landscape
painting, said the painter Philipp Hackert (1737-1807), whose fragmen-
tary observations on this subject were edited and published by none
other than Goethe.*? Hackert admits that he was moved to write down
his “‘theoretical-practical” observations by reading Sulzer’s article on
the subject.
Landscape painting, Hackert boldly declares, has the same value as
all other fields of painting. He may well have been the first artist to
explicitly make this claim. Landscape portrayal, he seems to have
believed, requires scientific preparation and painterly skill. He himself
was trained in optics, perspective, and even geology. Yet he was aware
that it is not scientific correctness that endows a landscape painting
with its particular value. In opposition to Lessing, he claims that there
is ideal beauty in nature. The landscape painter makes this beauty
visible.
“It is hardly open to doubt, ” wrote another painter, Carl Grass, in
1809, “that the notions concerning this branch of art [landscape paint-
ing], which has been so popular particularly in modern times, were, and
are, vaguer than those concerning any other field of painting.” *° Here,
then, we learn both of the popularity of landscape painting and of the

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feeling that its “notions” are not well enough defined. A few years later,
Carl Grass published a great book, Sizilische Reise oder Ausziige aus dem
Tagebuch eines Landschaftsmalers (Sicilian Journey or Excerpts from the
Diary of a Landscape Painter) (Stuttgart and Tiibingen, 1815), which
tries to come a step closer to the old ideal of an orbis pictus.
Landscape painting, says Carl Grass in the earlier article, has a wide
range; it offers the spectator a ladder that leads from the simplest
imitation of the insignificant object (of “the true”), “through the
pleasant and charming, to the highest poetry of the Romantic and the
sublime.” But Carl Grass, more than any other artist or writer before
him, makes landscape painting into a mirror image of the artist’s mind.
A work of art will move the beholder, he says, only if it shows “traces
of independent life,” only if it emerges from the amplitude of the
artist’s disposition (Gemiit). This quality, our painter-writer thinks,
becomes more pointed in landscape painting. He asks: Is not landscape
painting the art “in which infinitely much still remains to be done, and
in which the genius can still, if not break new ground, at least pave
new paths of his own?”

DEC ARUS

It is at this stage that the most important of treatises on landscape

painting was written, Carus’s Letters on Landscape Painting.
Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) was such a many-sided personality
that it is difficult to fit him into any regular category. Professor of
obstetrics in Dresden, personal physician to the king of Saxony, author
of a popular textbook on zootonomy (the anatomy and dissection of
animals), he was a prolific writer on a variety of subjects; his book on
the symbolism of the human figure (1853) is perhaps the last represen-
tative of a hermetic, Neoplatonic approach to the physical structure of
man. In addition to all this, he was also a painter. His philosophy, as
stated in his memoirs (in itself an interesting document of mid-nine-
teenth-century intellectual life), was informed by one idea: it is “the
thought, already surmised by many philosophers of Antiquity, concern-
ing the inner, necessary, and unconditional compounding of the world-

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structure into a unique, infinite, organic whole, in one word: the idea
of the world-soul, which then was again introduced into science by
Schelling’s great and luminous mind.”*' He turned to painting, as he
said, to set himself free from the “turbid conditions of the soul.” In his
Lebenserinnerungen und Denkwiirdigkeiten (Memoirs) (I, pp. 169 ff.), he
argues that “the more heavily trouble of the soul or lonely, deep pain
are manifested in some ingenious, dark painting, and appear there as a
kind of secret reflection, the sooner peace of mind returns.”
In 1831, Carus published his Briefe iiber Landschaftsmalerei (Letters on
Landscape Painting), and a second edition appeared only four years
later. The book was written much earlier, however, the major part of it
in 1815. That Carus should have composed his theory of landscape
painting in Dresden at that time seems, in retrospect, not a matter of
chance. The collection of paintings in Dresden contained representative
works of the acknowledged masters of that art; here Carus could have
seen important paintings by Ruysdael, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Just
as two generations earlier this collection had stimulated the young
Winckelmann to write his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art, it
may now have influenced Carus to compose his treatise on landscape
painting. Moreover, precisely in 1800, the Academy of Art in Dresden
—the first real academy of art in Germany, as Nicolas Pevsner puts
it **—appointed Johann Christian Klengel professor of landscape paint-
ing, probably one of the very first appointments of its kind. In 1801,
Caspar David Friedrich exhibited in Dresden his first landscape paint-
ing. Later, Carus was closely connected with Friedrich, and wrote
particularly about his landscapes. The Briefe iiber Landschaftsmalerei were
obviously written out of the concern with landscape painting that
occupied an important place in the reflections of artists and critics in
his city and his time.
The Briefe are written in an easy, personal style. The careful reader,
however, is not misled by the conversational tone; behind the colloquial
presentation there lies a system of analytical distinctions. To be sure,
these distinctions are not always carried out consistently; sometimes
notions overlap, sometimes they appear rather surprisingly, without
being sufficiently prepared for in the previous stages of the discussion.

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 Modern Theories of Art

The main line of Carus’s thought, however, is clear. In the following

observations, | shall discuss those of his views that are related to the
major theme of this chapter, the transformation of the symbol in art.
In landscape painting, Carus believes, we must distinguish between
three major components; he calls them Truth, Meaning, and Object.*?
“Truth” provides the “body of the work of art,” it conjures up the
portion of nature represented; in more scholastic terms, it is also called
“the correspondence of art and nature.” A landscape painting, however,
is not just the reflection of a piece of nature in a picture. In the
landscape picture, we feel the impact of a creative mind. It is the mind
that selects a given piece of visible nature and transforms it into an
organic whole. By so doing the mind endows the landscape with
“Meaning.” Landscape, it appears, expresses a psychological state or
condition. To express a given condition of mind, you have to select the
appropriate objects. Not every object is able to express all mental
conditions. Here, then, we see the role of the “Object.”
On the basis of these distinctions, Carus describes, in the third letter,
the aim of landscape painting. It is the “representation of a certain
mood of the soul (meaning) by the imitation of a corresponding mood
of nature (truth)” (p. 41). What he terms “the mood of nature” is a
new notion, not previously discussed; influenced by a great tradition of
natural philosophy, it will occupy us later on.
The very feasibility of landscape painting, Carus says, depends on our
understanding — possibly even solving—three problems. These prob-
lems are related to, but not identical with, the three distinctions I have
just mentioned. | shall put these problems, the core of Carus’s philoso-
phy of landscape painting, in question form. They are then: (1) How do
the stirrings (Regungen) of the mind (or soul) correspond to the states
of nature? (2) What effects do the individual objects represented in the
landscape have? (3) In what way is the idea of beauty achieved in the
representation of the life of nature? Let us briefly discuss the answers
Carus offers to each of these questions.
Without going into the broader philosophical context and foundation
of these problems, let us first remember that whenever Carus speaks
about what we see in the open landscape or what we observe on the
painted canvas, he always means what resides in our minds and souls.

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Whatever else the objects and notions discussed may represent, they
are always “mental images” (Vorstellung), and they are always planted in
the context of our consciousness (p. 44). It is only after having stressed
this point that we can ask how the correspondence between moods and
natural states becomes feasible.
Both man and nature, the Romantic philosopher believes, are ruled
by the same vital rhythm; their life cycles show the same stages of
unfolding or becoming and the same essential states of being. In the
organic life cycle, no matter in what particular domain it may be found,
Carus distinguishes four basic states. He calls them: (1) development;
(2) consummate representation (maturity); (3) wilting, and (4) complete
destruction. In nature, we encounter this rhythm everywhere, in the
seasons of the year, in the times of the day, and so forth. Does
something in man’s mind and heart correspond to these states and their
sequence? Carus, it seems, constructs a psychological counterpart. In
our emotional life, he distinguishes four major groups of moods and
states of mind. There is, first, the feeling of soaring; then, the feeling of
inner clearness and tranquillity; third, the feeling of wilting and depres-
sion; and, finally, lethargy and apathy. There is, then, a correspondence
between the states of nature and the states of the mind (pp. 45 ff.).
The idea of the life cycle, a particular version of the philosophy of
organic life, dominated Romantic thought. It is not for me here to
survey the significance of what might be called the “organic model” in
Romanticism. It is a well-known subject, and, in literary aesthetics, it
has been frequently studied and assessed.** | should like only to stress
that Carus’s thought, in all the fields of his inquiry and reflection,
clearly shows the influence of that model. The cycle of organic life
appears to him the image of an all-encompassing ideal. He frequently
uses such expressions as “life-form,” or even “the forming, unconscious
life,’ where the Platonic tradition, from which he drew, asked for
“Idea.” The development of the individual from embryo to old age
appeared to him as a mirror image of the life and unfolding of the
Idea.*°
Coming back to our specific subject, the correspondence between
states of nature and states of mind, we may ask, what artists or critics
were likely to have learned from Carus’s treatment of the congruence

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of nature and the human soul. One conclusion would have imposed
itself upon any reader who took the Briefe iiber Landschaftsmalerei seriously:
emotions, or moods, are the characteristics of states in nature and man;
they are also the criteria of the congruence of the two domains.
The general parallelism between states of nature and states of mind
possibly remains an abstract reflection, removed from the artist’s prac-
tical concerns. Carus’s discussion of the second problem, however, is of
direct, immediate significance for the painter. Here, we remember, the
question is, what are the effects of individual landscape features (‘‘ob-
jects”) on our mind. The principle of these “effects” is again the belief
in a correspondence between the character of a given natural state and
the mood it evokes in the person who experiences this state. Speaking
in very general terms, the unorganized has a chilling effect upon us;
objects that are in the state of self-formation (or of being formed) are
stimulating; and, finally, the accomplished has a calming effect (p. 50).
Carus does not tell us what makes him think that the states of nature
he mentions do indeed induce in the beholder the particular moods
described. In the present context, we cannot attempt to guess, or infer,
what his reasons were for these assertions that he enunciates so firmly,
nor can we investigate whether or not his theses are correct. For the
student of art theory, these broad ideas are less fruitful than what Carus
has to say about individual characteristics of the landscape.
In his discussion of specific features, Carus covers the major themes
of landscape painting, as he knew it, including the Dutch, Italian, and
German traditions. Looking at a bare rock, which does not provide food
or protection to organic life, we feel “strangely withdrawn and hard-
ened.” But if the rock is weathered down, begins to crumble, and
shows the first traces of vegetation, our feelings become milder and
warmer. The clear sky—the essence of air and light—is the proper
image of infinity. Being the dome of landscape as a whole, it “attracts
us deeply and powerfully.” Clouds, or even other objects towering up
on top of each other, restrict our gaze at infinity, or obstruct it
completely. The spectator whose view is thus blocked is overcome by
oppressive moods. Water, insofar as it is the source of life and the
reflection of the heavens on earth, is ambivalent in its effects; it evokes
both serene and dark longings. The world of vegetation—located

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between heaven, water, and earth—is particularly diversified in the

moods it induces. The lush plant life of the valley elicits feelings of
abundant life; the tree whose foliage has turned yellow, or the dead
tree, produce a mood of melancholy and gloom (pp. 50-53).
Reading Carus’s observations on the moods induced by the individual
features of landscape, one wonders what his ultimate intentions were.
His procedures remind us of the symbolic tradition that for centuries
informed both artists and critics, the production and the reading of
works of art. The very foundation of the symbolic tradition was the
existence of a store-house of motifs that carried articulate meanings.
From Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia to Winckelmann’s Versuch einer Allegorie,
writers repeated that a given figure, or motif, has a specific meaning.*°
Carus, in his theory of landscape painting, differs from the symbolic
tradition in claiming that a certain motif “induces a mood,” rather than
saying that it “has a meaning.” This difference, however, is not pro-
found. That a motif, or a work of art, “has” a meaning was often
understood as the spectator’s undergoing a certain experience. Carus’s
affinity to the symbolic tradition, then, is rather obvious.
Carus departs from the mythographic tradition not so much in his
procedures and modes of thought as in the material to which he applies
himself. The concern of humanistic mythographers was concentrated
almost exclusively on the human figure and its attributes. Carus himself,
in his late work on the symbolism of the human figure, represents
perhaps the last stage of this tradition.*’ In his Briefe iiber Landschaftsmal-
erei, however, he extends this mode of thought to nature. Landscape is
thereby endowed with the dignity hitherto reserved for the human
figure, and it is conceived as an equal to man in richness of hidden
dimensions and meanings. Carus’s symbolic approach to nature also
derives, though indirectly, from the age-old belief that natural objects
have hidden meanings, and can be read. The metaphor of the Book of
Nature, as we have learned from important recent studies, has a long
and very rich history.*° But so far as we know, these beliefs had never
been systematically applied to landscape painting as an art form. This
was what Carus did.
The third question—how is the idea of beauty represented in
natural landscape?—is not as directly pertinent to the painter’s job as

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is the second one, but it sheds light on the aims of landscape painting.
Generations have asked what beauty is, and their answers and the
definitions they have proposed have only obscured the problem. Carus
accepts the irrational as an irreducible quality of reality. Beauty, like
life, cannot be explained. While we do not know what beauty is, we
know what it does; and by its effects we can set it apart from all the
other components making up our world. Beauty, Carus says (p. 56), is
what stirs our perception of the Divine in nature. Beauty, it follows, is
not an established pattern; it is rather a mode of experience. It must
necessarily be a “triad” consisting of God, Nature, and Man. There can
be no beauty without man, that is, without somebody who experiences
beauty, who perceives it. But there cannot be beauty without nature.
We can experience and sensually perceive only what is a real embodi-
ment in nature. An abstraction—like a mathematical point—cannot
be beautiful; “beautiful” is only what appears to the senses.
Carus’s rejection of the abstract, his insistence on the organic, on the
individual figure or object that can be immediately experienced, is also
reflected in his attitudes to specific notions of art theory. Thus he
rejects the view of beauty entertained by classicism, and he does so
precisely because this is an abstract beauty. William Hogarth, as one
knows, presented a “waving line” as “the line of beauty, ”49 and this
theory of his was widely known and influential. Attacking Hogarth
more fiercely than anybody else, Carus says that “there can be no line
beautiful in itself, it becomes beautiful through the body that it sur-
rounds (and therefore it is not easy to conceive of a less felicitous idea
than Hogarth’s concerning the waving line as the sole line of beauty)”
(p- 147).
We need not go into the details of Carus’s doctrine of beauty as
such. We shall stick to landscape painting. The beauty of nature, he
says, is closer to God, the beauty of art is closer to man (pp. 62-63).
Art, we then understand, is the creation of man, as nature is the
creation of God. From here it follows that art mediates between nature
and man. Now, if this is valid for art in general, it is particularly true
for landscape painting. Landscape painting opens up our senses to the
experience of nature (p. 63). To mediate between nature and man, the
artist ‘has to learn the language of nature.” This, however, one can do

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only in the open, in forest, field, and sea, among mountains, rivers, and
valleys. When the artist’s soul, Carus says, is filled with “the inner
meaning of these different forms,” the “secret divine life of nature has
dawned upon him” (pp. 157-158). This, then, is the ultimate aim of
landscape painting: to reveal to the spectator the divine life hidden in
nature. Landscape paintings achieving these ends will “raise the specta-
tor to a higher contemplation of nature, [a contemplation that is]
mystical, orphic” (p. 158).

3. CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

The popular image of the Romantic artist is that of a highly literate

man, using words almost as frequently and as expertly as colors. Some
texts on art written by painters in the Romantic period are indeed of
great literary density and charm; they are precious documents, a mirror
to the mind of the time. On the whole, however, the literary legacy of
Romantic painters is rather slim; notwithstanding the common image,
the Romantic painter felt less need to record his ideas in writing than
did artists of some other periods. This is particularly true of Caspar
David Friedrich. Nevertheless, some isolated remarks —they have come
down to us in fragmentary form—may shed light on our specific
problem, the meaning of landscape.
They reveal, in adumbrated rather than crystallized form, a compre-
hensive background of thought and reflection. Central is the belief that
every object in nature, no matter how humble and insignificant in itself,
is capable of reflecting the Divine. “The Divine is everywhere,” said
Caspar David Friedrich, the great German Romantic landscape painter,
“also in a grain of sand, so | depicted it in the reed.” 5° The guardians
of traditional concepts were suspicious; they were not slow to perceive
that such a striking transgression of the inherited genres contained an
explosive power. As early as 1809, the chamberlain Basilius von Ram-
dohr attacked Friedrich and the trend he represented. This trend, our
learned chamberlain said, with particular reference to landscape paint-
ing, “is the unfortunate brood of the present time, and the terrible
preview of quickly approaching barbarity.” He epitomized the landscape
painter’s part in this sinister scenario in a sentence combining moral

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disgust with vivid language: “It is truly a presumption if landscape

painting wishes to creep into the church and crawl onto the altar.” >?
But the artists and writers who would today be termed “progressive”
understood the message. The great poet Heinrich von Kleist had this to
say about Friedrich’s famous painting Capuchin Friar by the Sea: “I am
convinced that, in his spirit, one could represent a mile-long stretch of
sand from the Mark [province], with a [single] barberry shrub on which
a lonely crow ruffles its feathers, and that this picture would have a
truly Ossianic ... effect. Could one paint this landscape with its own
chalk and its own water, then, I believe, one could make foxes and
wolves howl.” *?
Caspar David Friedrich himself stressed the significance of introspec-
tion in the process of painting a landscape. “The painter,” he said,
“should paint not only what he sees in front of him, but also what he
sees within himself.” °? This, one cannot help feeling, is strange advice
from a landscape painter. In another fragment, consisting of only two
lines, he addresses the practicing artist: “Close your bodily eye, in order
that you may see your image first with your spiritual eye. And then,
bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, so that it can affect
other [images], brought from outside into the interior.”°* These sen-
tences, the reader feels, might have been versions of a text by Plotinus.
What Carus, Friedrich’s friend and apostle, tells us about the paint-
er’s procedures is surely motivated by the desire to corroborate the
artist’s method. Friedrich, he says, “never made sketches, cartoons,
color outlines (Farbenentwiirfe) of his pictures, because he claimed (and
surely not without justice) that by these auxiliary means the imagination
cools down. He did not start his painting until it was vividly present in
his soul, and then he first rapidly drew on the neatly stretched canvas
with chalk and pencil the whole [composition or image], then cleanly
and completely with reed pen and China ink, and proceeded immedi-
ately to underpainting. His pictures therefore, in each stage of their
emergence, looked distinct and well ordered, and always bear the
impression of his peculiar [character], and of the mood in which they
first appeared to his mind.”°° Whether or not Carus’s description of
how Friedrich produced his landscapes is correct in every detail—it is
not our task to deal with this particular question—it is a significant

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theoretical statement, and it shows how powerful were Neoplatonic

trends of thought in early and mid-nineteenth-century reflection on
landscape painting.
But what does the artist whom Friedrich addresses see within him-
self? This is an old question, one that already played a crucial part in
sixteenth-century thought. Albrecht Diirer, the artist whom German
Romanticism adored,*® coined the phrase “secret treasure in the heart”
to describe what the artist finds in the depths of his mind.°’ It is this
accumulated “treasure,” one assumes, that provides the artist with the
images he draws upon from within. Friedrich does not explicitly say
what the artist finds in his mind, but it seems that what he means is
the mood that ought to pervade the painted landscape.
A critical remark of Friedrich’s on the work of another artist is
suggestive. Carus, who published this remark, did not disclose the
identity of that artist, replacing the name by a discreet “N. N.” The
picture Friedrich refers to must have been a truly Romantic work: it
represented a moonlight scene. But the subject matter alone is not
enough for him. “One sees in this large moonlight picture by the rightly
famous virtuoso artist N. N. more than one would wish to see, more
than one actually can see by moonlight.” In spite of the sarcasm, this is
not the core of Friedrich’s criticism. He continues: “But what the
surmising, feeling soul searches for, and what it seeks to find in every
picture, of this one sees here as little as in all the paintings by N. Neves
What “‘the surmising, feeling soul searches for” is, of course, the mood,
the reflection of an inner, human experience that is projected onto the
natural objects that compose the landscape.
In his fragmentary observations, Friedrich epitomizes two points that,
though not identical, hang closely together. They are not new, they
form part of the trend of ideas common to Romanticism. But Friedrich
gives them a particularly concise and suggestive formulation. First,
landscape painting is not primarily a record of nature; it is the projec-
tion of psychic life. The historical origin of landscape painting —the
faithful recording of objective natural data, closely related to cartogra-
phy—is altogether forgotten. It is now the emotions and moods
evoked, or suggested, by the landscape that are the core of the art form.
The second point is that landscape painting is seen as the medium

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particularly suited for the manifestation of moods. The historian cannot

help noting that this is, in fact, a revolutionary claim. Making landscape
painting the expressive medium par excellence marks the end of the
venerable tradition of humanism that for centuries dominated thought
on art. The humanistic tradition, it should be kept in mind, considered
the figure of man as the principal medium for expressing emotions and
moods in art. It is only the human figure that reflects experiences; the
landscape is merely the background, the spatial frame in which the
figure is placed. In principle, at least, landscape has little to contribute
to the revealing of moods. This attitude is completely reversed in
Romantic thought. In Romanticism in general, and in the views of
Romantic painters in particular, comparatively little attention is paid to
the human figure as an expressive medium. It is now the landscape,
animated by a mysterious life and miraculously reflecting human moods,
that takes the place and traditional function of the human figure. The
bells of a new age are tolling.

4. VISCHER

Did the tendency to understand landscape painting as mirroring human

moods represent more than the ideas of a few Romantics? Did such
views ever become an influential trend in the interpretation of art? The
historian, looking back at the bewildering amplitude of opinions that
flourished in the decades after Romanticism, cannot help wondering.
An important witness is Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). He
was no painter, nor did he have Carus’s colorful personality. On the
contrary, he was a typical professor, lecturing for decades on aesthetics
at the University of Tiibingen. In a sense, he can be seen as the link
connecting the ages: he was himself a belated disciple of Hegel; his late
essay on the symbol deeply affected Aby Warburg. Vischer’s huge work
on aesthetics, alarming both for the bulk of the six enormous tomes
and for their scholastic form of presentation, was written in the middle
of the nineteenth century, when the author was still quite young.”
Though he is far from unriddling all the problems he set out to solve,
his work is a fine mirror of creative academic thought. Wishing to be
comprehensive and to contain all the arts and their variations in his

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system, Vischer also had to deal with landscape painting. Though the
subject is clearly marginal in his thought, the pages devoted to it bear
important testimony to the further development, even eventual triumph,
of the trend we have been outlining in this section.
Landscape painting, Vischer says in his systematic treatise, idealizes a
given complex of natural features, belonging to inorganic and vegetative
nature, “transforming it into the expression of a surmised mood of the
soul” (III, p. 648). Before we come to the central assertion—that
landscape painting should be an expression of human moods—it is
worth our while to note that the author here proposes a process of
painting landscape that is opposed to time-honored workshop proce-
dures. It was accepted workshop custom that the artist choose individ-
ual motifs and objects from nature, and that he then combine them in
an order that, with regard to nature itself, may be arbitrary. This, it
was believed, is the secret of “composition” in the landscape picture.
But this procedure, the Tiibingen professor thought, misses the truth.
It is in nature itself that we must find the overall unity of the scene and
the overall composition of the picture. But does not the painter of
panoramas (Vedutenmaler) do precisely this? And yet Vischer, like Carus,
excludes the painter of panoramas from the community of artists. What
distinguishes the true landscape painter from the painter of panoramas
is that he transforms the depiction of a landscape into the expression of
a mood.
In 1842, seven years after the second, and enlarged, edition of Carus’s
Briefe iiber Landschaftsmalerei was published, F. T. Vischer devoted a
lengthy discussion to the nature of landscape painting (in a review of a
publication of watercolors). In this discussion, which is still interesting
today, and not only as a historical document, Vischer treats landscape
painting as an expression of human emotions and moods. In everything
we look at, he says, we see man. This is also true for landscape painting;
beautiful nature reminds us of human conditions. And yet we sense—
vaguely, but surely—that the human moods permeating nature are
only lent to it by ourselves.
“The proper content (Inhalt) of a landscape painting is, therefore, a
reflection of the subjective life [of the human soul] in the domain of the
objective life of nature.”°' The belief that landscape painting is, in its

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very essence, an art of expressing moods was, then, held not only by
eccentric painters and poets, who took their metaphors literally, as it
were; it was also endorsed by the acknowledged aesthetic philosopher
of the age. The essence of landscape painting is complex, however, and
Vischer was more aware of this complexity than were poets and
painters. Landscape painting expressing human moods serves, in fact, as
a model of the way in which aesthetic or expressive objects exist. The
landscape permeated by moods is based on the interaction of two
different moments: on the one hand, I am aware that it is | who lend
the landscape its seeingly human characteristics and moods. On the
other, in spite of this knowledge, I—whether spectator or artist —go
on investing mountains, trees, rivers, or whatever other objects make
up a landscape picture, with these characteristics and moods. The
spectator is not mistaken; he knows that the subject matter of landscape
is nature, not man. This awareness, however, does not counteract the
expressive illusion.
Vischer, heir to a great philosophical tradition, could not accept the
expressiveness of nature in a landscape painting as a mere projection of
human emotions onto objects that, in themselves, are altogether alien
to anything not merely material. Hegel claimed in his Aesthetics that in
painting, God “appears as a spiritual and living person who enters the
Church and gives to every individual the possibility of placing himself
in spiritual community and reconciliation with him.” © Referring to this
statement by Hegel, Vischer widens the range of God’s appearance in
the arts. For sculpture, Hegel’s assertion may be correct, Vischer says,
but in painting, God also appears in nature. In his Asthetik, Vischer
writes: “Air, earth, water, tree, the last reed stalk at the pond trembles
and weaves in ominous shimmer, and seems to wish to say something
significant” (III, p. 525). It is this state of affairs that makes landscape
painting possible and significant.
What matters to the spectator looking at a landscape painting,
however, is only the expression of mood. In an untranslatable German
phrase, Vischer says that the painter whose landscape pictures do not
affect us in our emotions has achieved nothing (III, p. 649).°? This
painting is like music, he continues, “‘where our heart is full and yet has
no word for it, or as it is in lyrical poetry, when one disregards the

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specific contents and considers only the resoundings and weavings that
go through a poem” (III, p. 649). The comparison of landscape with
music recurs in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth century. That
Vischer employs this comparison—he does so several times—shows, I
believe, how close he came to altogether modern ideas about an art that
is abstract in subject matter, yet distinct and powerful in expression. It
is with this vague adumbration of an abstract art that we must close
our brief survey of reflections on landscape painting as a symbolic art
form in early nineteenth-century thought.

IV. COLOR SYMBOLISM

I. THE CONCERN WITH COLOR

The generation around 1800 witnessed a revival of concern with the

significance and “essence” of color. Painters and poets, scholars and
critics once again vigorously discussed questions such as what color
actually is and what psychological effects can be achieved by correctly
using tones and hues. The problems, we remember, are not new. The
history of theoretical reflection on painting can be imagined as a series
of swings of the pendulum: one period extolled line and composition,
another rather saw color as a major factor in the art. In the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the very foundations of the
Academy of Art, particularly in France, were shaken by the famous
‘‘Débat sur le coloris” and by the quarrel between the so-called Pous-
sinists and Rubenists. These debates, as we know, were in fact a contest
between those who thought line and composition the supreme value in
painting and those who upheld color as the supreme pictorial value.%*
Neoclassicism, the style that acquired a dominant position in the art
and aesthetic thought of the late eighteenth century, shifted the pen-
dulum once more in the direction of line. ‘The lines of a Grecian
composition,” said John Flaxman (1755—1826), the English sculptor and
influential draughtsman, “enchant the beholder by harmony and perfec-
tion. .. .” He praised Michelangelo for the master’s great “sensibility to
the play of lines in his picture.” °° Of color he had nothing to say.

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Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who deserves, more than anybody else,

to be considered the founding father of the ideology of Neoclassicism,
speaks of “noble outline;” b in the contour he sees the highest value of
both natural and ideal beauty; and he praises Raphael’s Sistine Madonna
for her “great and noble outline.”°°He ignores color in his first treatise,
but in the Sendschreiben that followed he claims that the “charm of color”
helps to conceal the artist’s faults.°’ At best, then, color is of rather
dubious value.
In Romantic thought the pendulum once again swung back. Reading
what painters, critics, and poets of the early nineteenth century said
about painting, we witness a return to the high regard for color and an
intensive concern with coloristic phenomena. The range of color inter-
ests is striking. A systematic study of color symbolism, as conceived and
practiced in past ages, marks one end of this range. It is not for me
here to go into the long and enthralling history of color interpretation.
Ever since biblical times, and probably even earlier, people have re-
flected on what colors “mean,” what is revealed by them, and how they
act upon the spectator. Color, it has been felt in past ages, is able to
express the most sublime ideas. So intimate, it was believed, is the
connection between color and the Divine that some modern scholars,
studying the history of our problem, have been tempted to speak of a
“theology of color.”©? The symbolic character of color seems to be a
universal phenomenon, too broad to be discussed in our context. Even
if we stay within the limits of the Western world,a historical outline of
the “theology of color” would demand a heavy tome. Color symbolism
was not only explicit; it is also implied in descriptions of a vast variety
of objects and visions. To give but one example, it has been noticed
that the visions of mystics, particularly between the late Middle Ages
and the seventeenth century, show a definite leaning toward detailed
color descriptions, toward conceiving the hues as manifestations of
spiritual life.©? The early decades of the nineteenth century were very
attentive to these descriptions; as we shall see, painters and poets sensed
what these color visions meant to convey.
The study of color in the past, needless to say, was not limited to
religious symbolism, and the early nineteenth century was fully aware
of the great variety of approaches to the chromatic phenomenon. To

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indicate the range of the interest in color evinced in this period, it will
be enough to mention the work of Michel Eugéne Chevreul (1786—
1887), a professor of organic chemistry, celebrated in his day for his
studies of the components of fats and the nature of soap. Appointed
director of the dye laboratories at the Gobelin tapestry factory, he
immersed himself in a study of color relations. Though motivated by
the desire to find a scientific clue for the proper application of colors in
the famous factory, the great work that he composed was essentially
theoretical. The heavy volume containing this study, called De la loi du
contraste simultane des couleurs, appeared in Paris in 1839.’° Chevreul’s
investigation, though seemingly directed only toward technical applica-
tions, and objectives, timeless truth, provides the historian with many
clues concerning the effects, psychological and otherwise, that color
was in his time believed to have on the spectator. His color studies, in
spite of their altogether nonsymbolic character, are in fact linked in
many ways to the spiritual world of the Romantic period.
Attempts to understand color, and to uncover the meanings allegedly
inherent in hues, were then a common feature in the culture of the
period, particularly in views on painting. I shall try to illustrate this
trend by a few outstanding examples.

2. RUNGE

With regard to the use and meaning of color in painting, perhaps

nobody in Romantic thought is as revealing as the painter Philipp Otto
Runge (1777~1810). One of the most radical Romantics in German,
even in European, painting, he also had a speculative mind, profoundly
attracted to reflecting on what he was doing in his art. The two volumes
of his Hinterlassene Schriften,’' edited by his brother, reveal a searching
soul and intellect that harbored many more tensions and conflicts than
the commonly accepted image of Runge would lead one to expect. We
shall come back to some of the broader aspects of his views on art in
the next chapter; here we shall glance only briefly at what he has to say
about the magic and meaning of color in painting.
Runge’s theoretical concern with color was not short-lived or mar-
ginal; it seems to have lasted throughout his life, and it influenced his

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spiritual world and artistic work. He was acquainted with the great
traditions of color study and interpretation of the past. “What Albrecht
Diirer and, above all, Leonardo da Vinci had written about color was
very well known to him,” so writes the scientist Henrich Steffens, ’*
with whom he corresponded on color. Other authors of past centuries
fascinated him in this context, though they had nothing to do with
painting. Here one thinks especially of the German mystic Jakob Boehme,
whose color descriptions (of what he perceived in his visions) seem to
have struck Runge particularly. But Runge’s color studies were not
limited to the distant past; in addition to his own observations, he also
looked for living sources. His correspondence with Goethe is devoted
almost exclusively to the problems of color.
Runge tried to establish a comprehensive color system, and to
present it in both words and graphic form. To elucidate color relations
for himself, and to present his views clearly, he invented his “color
sphere” (Farbenkugel), a model to illustrate the ratios of color mixtures.
He arrived at this model through years of empirical study, of patient
and careful observation of color phenomena in nature and their treat-
ment in the workshop. The “color sphere,” so he wrote to his brother
in 1808, “is not a work of art, but a mathematical figure of a few
philosophical reflections.” This description hits the true nature of his
construction, perhaps more than he himself knew. As compared to, say,
Leonardo da Vinci’s color observations (on which he relied so much),
Runge’s comments, detailed and specific as they are, sometimes have a
curiously abstract, theoretical quality. They lack the full saturation with
observation of nature so characteristic of the great Renaissance artist.
Coming from the workshop, and familiar with Renaissance art theo-
ries, often so close to the artist’s actual work, Runge intended his
“color sphere” to be of practical use to the painter. The “decline of
art,” he believed, follows from the decline of our knowledge of color.”?
Naturally, therefore, he wished to revive the knowledge of color in
order to improve the quality of art. Considering the complicated ratios
and relationships between colors that he describes in his theoretical
reflections, however, one cannot help wondering what kind of profit an
artist standing in front of his canvas could have derived from Runge’s
explorations. Rather than a set of practical prescriptions meant to help

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the “user” directly, Runge’s deliberations appear as attempts to under-

stand the very foundations of the painter’s métier. Here, the modern
reader feels, is an artist who is profoundly serious in his desire to
understand the real nature of the strange, evocative power he is han-
dling with his brush, and what it is that makes for the magic of color.
The painter’s atelier, in Runge’s thought, is not so much the ultimate
destination to which he is trying to bring an easily applicable know-
how; it is rather the point of departure of his investigations, one could
almost say, of his intellectual and artistic adventures. In the painter’s
workshop, color phenomena and color relations become visible that in
other contexts and other places are either dim and confused, or remain
altogether hidden from sight. But what he perceives in the context of
the workshop is less nature itself than what he rightly calls “philosoph-
ical reflections.”
A somewhat similiar situation obtains with regard to color symbol-
ism. Reading his notes, one inclines to use this term, and in fact this is
often done. Yet the term “symbolic” should here be taken with a grain
of salt; it needs qualification. For Runge, color in general, and the hues
and tones in a painting in particular, are more than just sensual
impressions, more than mere chromatic experience of the eye. Color,
he says, is not “matter like a stone or a piece of wood,” it is “‘in itself
. Movement and a natural force which related to the form as a tone
relates to the word.”’* While this comparison may not be altogether
clear, it is obvious that Runge conceives of color as a matter through
which something else, something that is nonmaterial and nonsensual,
shines forth. Colors go beyond themselves, they manifest, indicate, or
evoke. On the other hand, Runge’s recognition of the symbolic charac-
ter of colors does not mean that he accepts the dictionary version of
symbolism. He does not associate a certain color or tone with a certain
meaning or emotion. In other words, he does not conceive of color
symbolism as a codified system from which we can pick out, or isolate,
any particular element. It is the whole of the color system that is
symbolic, that indicates an overall unity, something that “holds the
world together.” In color he finds an analogy of such a comprehensive,
overall unity, a metaphor of the ladder from the invisible God to the
humblest part of nature.

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3. GOETHE
Goethe was not a declared theoretician of painting. We know, of
course, that he was interested in the visual arts, that occasionally he
himself painted and made drawings, and that his writings on art, though
consisting mainly of occasional pieces, fill a heavy tome. But in his great
work on color—and this is the text we are here dealing with—he
paid only scant attention to painting, at least explicitly. In spite of all
this, however, we cannot overlook Goethe in this brief survey of
pictorial color symbolism of the early nineteenth century. In his color
studies he said so much that is relevant to art that the student trying to
explore contemporary views on painting has to consider some aspects
at least of the poet’s work as if he had been writing directly on art.
The Theory of Colors (Farbenlehre) was not a marginal product of
Goethe’s restless mind. He devoted to it many years of study and
writing. The completed work fills a large volume in the Propylaen
edition, and this tome does not include many preparatory studies. He
himself considered it one of his major achievements, and on occasion
he intimated that he placed his scientific work on color above his
poetry. More than half the book is devoted to his own findings and to
the conclusions he draws from them; the rest is given over to the
famous dispute with Newton. We need not here go into that dispute; it
has clearly and without any qualification been decided in favor of the
great British scientist. If one still returns, time and again, to Goethe’s
mistaken position, this is because it provides a classic example of an
artist’s approach to science and to the study of nature. As such, it also
reveals a great deal about painting, and of what was thought to be the
painter’s attitude to color.
The mental approach that Goethe wholly and violently rejected—
the approach that Newton personified for him—essentially consists in
the study of natural phenomena by means of quantification. ‘“Mathe-
matics” as a way of studying the diversified amplitude of natural
experience — this seemed to him a kind of primeval fall. “In the Middle
Ages,” he said, “mathematics was the chief organ by means of which
men hoped to master the secrets of nature, and even now, geometry in
certain departments of physics, is justly considered of first importance”

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(722).”> The study of various natural phenomena has suffered from this
exaggerated mathematical approach, Goethe believes. This is particu-
larly true in the study of color. Color doctrine has suffered from
“having been mixed up with optics generally.” Optics, Goethe admits,
is a “science which cannot dispense with mathematics.” The theory of
color, however, “may be investigated quite independently of optics.”
(725).
Modern scholars have noted that in Newton’s Optics, as opposed to
his other great work, the Principia, mathematics in fact plays a rather
minor role. What Goethe so vehemently rejects in the treatment of
color is, then, not precisely an exaggerated use of mathematics proper.
It is the very foundations of an abstract approach to nature, the
“artificiality” of the experiment, that he cannot accept. The revolt
against the application of mathematics to the arts is of course not new;
as we know, it had already given rise to significant expressions in the
theory of the visual arts. It would obviously be wrong to consider
Goethe’s Theory of Colors as a link in the tradition of art theory. Never-
theless, one cannot forget that when artists and art theorists revolted
against the rule of mathematics, they saw it mainly as an imprisonment
of the imagination, and an impoverishment of the amplitude of natural
phenomena in favor of some lifeless abstractions.’° Goethe’s rejection
of mathematics in the treatment of color is not so far removed from
those attitudes in former ages.
In the preface to the first edition of the Theory of Colors, 1810, Goethe
reveals at least part of his sources. “We should try in vain,” he says,
“to describe a man’s character, but let his acts be collected and an idea
of the character will be presented to us.” And he goes on. “The colors
are acts of light; its active and passive modifications.” The old Neopla-
tonic view, however modified by modern science, is still felt. Early in
the work, after making some color observation, he says: “An important
consideration suggests itself here, to which we shall frequently have
occasion to return. Color itself is a degree of darkness; hence Kircher is
perfectly right in calling it lumen opacatum” (69).7”
The trinity of light, darkness, and color forms the content of Goethe’s
color doctrine. Many nineteenth- and even twentieth-century commen-
tators, strongly influenced by the fashionable admiration of scientism,

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were inclined to depict Goethe’s book as a regular “scientific” enter-

prise. This, however, is only partly true. In discussing light and color,
Goethe is thinking of the arts just as much as of science. “From these
three, light, shade, and color, we construct the visible world, and thus,
at the same time, make painting possible, an art which has the power
of producing on a flat surface a much more perfect visible world than
the actual one can be,” he says at the beginning of his introduction to
the first edition of the Theory of Colors. What he wants to discover is the
common root of nature and art—an old wish of Neoplatonists throughout
the ages.
Art, it was claimed in Neoplatonic thought, follows the principle of
Nature, it acts like nature. Plotinus, in his later treatise on the Beautiful,
said that “the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create
by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects
are themselves imitations; then, we must recognize that they give no
bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Reason-
Principles (logoi) from which Nature itself derives. ...” A little later in
the same treatise, he further explains: “the artist himself goes back,
after all, to that wisdom in Nature which is embodied in himself. . . .” 78
Goethe’s work on color, though surely a study in natural science (as
he understood it), is an outstanding document of the humanistic ap-
proach to the world of visual experience. At the center of his concern
is the question of how man perceives, and emotionally reacts to, color.
He is largely concerned with the effect of colors “‘on the eye, by means
of which they act on the mind.” Colors “are immediately associated
with the emotions of the mind.” Therefore, ‘“‘We shall not be surprised
to find that these appearances presented singly, are specific, that in
combination they may produce an harmonious, characteristic, often
even an inharmonious effect on the eye, ... producing this impression
in their most general elementary character, without relation to the
nature or form of the object on whose surface they are apparent.
Hence, color considered as an element of art, may be made subservient
to the highest aesthetical ends” (758).
At the end of his own observations, Goethe comes to reflect on the
subject of color symbolism. The foundations of this symbolism are
found in nature herself, in the way we perceive colors. This is also the

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foundation of their use in art. What makes it possible for us to employ

colors for moral and aesthetic ends is “that every color produces a
distinct impression on the mind, and thus addresses at once the eye and
feelings” (915). When we deliberately exploit the distinct and character-
istic impressions that each color makes, we are “coinciding entirely
with nature.” Such a use, that is, the application of color “in conformity
with its effect,” so that it “would at once express its meaning,” Goethe
calls the symbolic use of color. Color symbolism, then, is not artificially
—or, as we often say, conventionally—established; it follows from
nature. It is not difficult to conclude, even without the author spelling
it out in detail, that the spectator intuitively grasps the meaning of such
colors and color combinations. Color symbolism, in other words, is a
heightened form of artistic expression (916).
Goethe is also aware of a different kind of symbolism, the one we
call artificial or conventional. He sees it from the point of view of
application. We know that, as William Heckscher put it, he was
“fascinated” by emblems.” To color, too, he applies an emblematic
approach. Conventional color symbolism, it follows from what he says,
is close to, but not identical with, the natural symbolism of colors.
Another application, he says, “might be called the allegorical application
[of colors]. In this there is more of accident and caprice, inasmuch as
the meaning of the sign must be first communicated to us before we
know what it is to signify; what idea, for instance, is attached to the
color green, which has been appropriated to hope?” (917).
In a “Confession of the Author” that Goethe appended to the
historical part of his Theory of Colors, he explained the reasons that
moved him to his investigation of colors, and the circumstances under
which his interest in color phenomena was originally aroused. His
familiarity with painting is here adduced as a major factor in awakening
his fascination with colors. From childhood on, he says,” he used to
visit the workshops of painters; several pictures “were invented, com-
posed, the parts . . . carefully studied” in his presence. He himself never
felt, he says, the urge to practice painting,” but he searched “for laws
and rules that would govern” that art. This reads like a faithful descrip-
tion of the way in which some humanistic art theories were formulated.
Yet both in conversing with living artists and in studying textbooks,

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Goethe adds, he could find no clear advice and instruction with regard
to colors. Even what Gérard de Lairesse said, he specifically notes, is
modest indeed.** It was this state of affairs, as he says, that brought
him to the study of color.
The intimate connection of Goethe’s color concepts with the art of
painting is not only a matter of how his interest in the subject arose, a
question that can be answered by reference to his biography; the
connection also persists in his fully developed views. He concludes the
first, essential, part of his Theory of Colors with some “Concluding
Observations” in which he speaks of art and the work of art. A work of
art, he here says, “should be the effusion of genius, the artist should
evoke its substance and form from his inmost being, treat his materials
with sovereign command, and make use of external influences only to
accomplish his powers.” *? This is not how a physicist, even in Goethe’s
day, would end a study of color. Our poet-scientist wrote for (or of)
people for whom color had become an inner experience. Chromatic
sensations stream from the depth of consciousness rather than from the
“raw” outside world. No wonder, then, that from the beginning they
are endowed with meaning and emotion.

4. LATE ROMANTICISM: RICHTER

Symbolism of all sorts, including the symbolism of color, goes beyond

the emotions and experiences of a single individual, it contains an
element of broad tradition. In a culture such as Romanticism, in which
the significance of the subjective and the individual was strongly empha-
sized, symbolism was bound to lead to a conflict with the rising tide of
subjectivism. This unavoidable clash can be shown in many examples.
In color symbolism, the notes of Richter provide a fine illustration.
Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884), a late Romantic artist, is best
known for his landscape paintings. Suiting the tastes and wishes of the
German lower middle class, he became one of the most famous painters
of the mid-nineteenth century. His personal literary testimony, Lebenser-
innerungen (Memories of a Life), was well known and widely read.
Richter has not the intellectual and moral profundity of a Runge, let
alone the unique and overwhelming personality of Goethe, but his notes

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 The Symbol

have the value of a popular document. The problems that occupied the
minds of artists and critics in the 1830s and 1840s are clearly reflected
in the Lebenserinnerungen.**
Richter never questioned the significance of a theory for the painter.
“I see,” he said in 1823, “how important a healthy, clear theory is for
an artist.” But theory should not remain something external, or self-
enclosed. He therefore continues: “But actually he [the artist] must
create it [the theory] for himself, or at least he must assimilate the
views of others in such a way that they become his own property, and
are suited to his mode of thinking and become part of it” (p. 494). The
problem is obvious here: on the one hand, he accepts the need for a
general, valid theory; on the other, he makes it a personal theory,
differing from one artist to the other. But such an individual theory,
suiting only a single artist, ceases to be a theory at all. In other words,
Richter wants to reconcile the general theory and the individual tem-
perament. He does not know, however, how the gap between the two
can be bridged.
As a rule, Richter does not deal with the great philosophical prob-
lems of art; to the degree in which they can be found in his written
legacy, they are implied rather than explicitly presented. His notes and
letters smell of the atelier. And it is precisely in this respect that we see
how much he is indebted to tradition. This is clearly illustrated by his
views concerning the application of color in the process of producing a
picture. Workshop tradition from the early Renaissance to high acade-
mism required a firm and clear outline before the painter touched a
brush dipped in color. This is also what Richter repeats: “The picture
should be drawn with the pen, precisely and powerfully.” The demand
that the outlining should be done with a pen (unusual advice indeed)
epitomizes, as it were, the strict boundaries imposed upon the applica-
tion of color that comes in the next stage. But Richter inserts still
another stage. “Before one puts the hand to the canvas, one must evoke
once again the idea [obviously of the color distribution], if it has not
already been laid down in a color sketch. Then apply the colors in
broad masses” (p. 575). Now, all this surely does not read like the views
of an artist who is freely following his subjective fancy and working
under the impact of an irrational inspiration.

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 Modern Theories of Art

In spite of such traditional roots, Richter declares that “the major

point, however, on which everything in an artist depends, is to form
(ausbilden) his genius, his proper, spiritual self...” (p. 494). The rising
trend of subjectivity is getting the upper hand.
He is aware of the dangers inherent in what he calls “subjectivity.”
In 1850, he notes that “subjectivity is the general disease of our time,
and it makes us sick ourselves.” Subjectivity is deviating from an
objective norm that does not depend on an individual, or seeing
processes from an individual point of view. Using energetic language,
he says: “Everybody wants to decide the time after his own, more or
less defective, watch, because he negates the sun. We have only opin-
ions and beliefs, but no positive, norm-establishing truths . . .” (p. 601).
Awareness of these dangers does not rescue him, however, from fasci-
nation with the subjective. He shares the late Romantics’ belief in
developing the individual personality, regarding this notion as a supreme
ideal.
We sense an overall, profound conflict in Richter’s views on land-
scape painting, the field to which most of his own pictorial work
belongs. The impression visible nature makes on man, he holds, is one
of divine revelation; landscape, in his own words, is a “living hieroglyph
of God’s laws and sacred intentions.” The painter depicting a landscape,
however, apparently cannot follow the divine intentions blindly. To
avoid making his landscape painting an “artificial allegory,” the painter
must rely on his subjective feelings and impressions. Nature, Richter
advises the painter, should be perceived “in such moments in which it
moves me, and everybody, most powerfully (for instance, seasons of day
and year)” (pp. 516-517). The artist, then, interferes with the divine
law, even if only half-consciously, by selecting the moments and sights
that reveal more or less of the divine. It goes without saying that such
a selection is directed by the artist’s individual personality.
But the landscape painter is also a mediator, as it were, of God’s
revelation to man, and therefore the intensity of his experience is
crucial. Addressing an anonymous artist, or perhaps himself, Richter
notes: “In order for your work to act on the mind [of the spectator], it
must emerge unfaded (ungeschwacht) from the [artist’s] mind. Therefore,
invent and work with profound love and belief” (p. 517). This, of

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course, is still another version of the old Horatian formula, requiring

that poets should themselves experience the emotions they wish to
evoke in the minds of their readers. But the classical origin of Richter’s
demand does not alter the fact that the artist’s emotions, the intensity
and power of his feelings, become a criterion for the efficacy of the
landscape’s expressiveness, of its ability to reveal what God has hidden
in nature.
When it comes to color, some of the trends and conflicts I have tried
to describe become even more manifest. Richter adheres to traditional
color symbolism. As if he were stating an undisputed fact, he remarks:
“It is fully clear how each color separately produces a special effect on
the soul (Gemiit)” (pp. 517-518). So little does he doubt the validity of
this assertion that he suggests something of a dictionary of emotional
color effects. “So, for instance, green is fresh and vivid, red cheerful or
magnificent, violet melancholic (as in [the work of Caspar David]
Friedrich), black most nations have accepted as the color of sadness and
of death” (p. 518).
Observations on the meanings and emotional qualities attributed to
individual colors are of course not new. Precisely the same comments
recur in the tracts composed during the Renaissance on the same
issue.°> What is new in Richter is the attempt to discover emotional
characters in color combinations. What does the relationship of, say,
green to red evoke or express? Says Richter: ““Magnificence, amplitude.”
And “green to blue—serene, serious, sublime” (p. 518). It is possible,
he obviously believed, not only to establish the meanings of individual
hues, but also to build up a comprehensive system of color relations. At
precisely the time that Chevreul was considering color relations on a
scientific basis, Richter was looking at the same phenomenon from the
point of view of artistic expression.
Color combinations appear to Richter in the guise of expressive
landscape motifs. “How gloomy, mournful is the dark gray-green of the
lime tree; how serene the light green of the beech tree! What feelings
do the yellow trees in the fall evoke, with black branches, withered
foliage and grass. How ghostlike the black oak forest in the winter,
when the snow is widely spread and hangs on the boughs” (p. 518).
In spite of this interlocking of expressive color and expressive land-

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scape motifs, Richter is aware that color relations can evoke emotions
even independently of the representation of material objects or pieces
of nature. In modern terms, color compositions can be expressive
patterns of an abstract nature. For the expressive relationships of colors
he uses the phrase “the spiritual arrangement of colors.” One cannot
help thinking of Kandinsky, who is the ultimate descendant of the
tradition so forcefully represented by Richter. The “spiritual arrange-
ment of colors,” one is not surprised to read, “has much similarity to
music, in treatment as well as in effect. Colors are sounds” (p. 518).
The fusion of colors and sounds, it is well known, is a frequent feature
of Romantic thought on art.*°
It is also not surprising that Richter characterizes the work and style
of individual painters by the emotions the color scales they use evoke.
“What life, what freshness, what blooming amplitude Titian’s color
excites,” our painter exclaims. The emotional tone of Poussin’s color is
altogether different. “A sweet sadness and yearning come over us [when
looking at] Poussin’s landscapes. These are gray, blended, somewhat
dark colors” (p. 518).
What follows from all this is obvious: the range of color symbolism
becomes broader, it is applied to more and more aspects of nature and
art; experiences of nature and works of art are grasped on the basis of
what the colors say or intimate or evoke. At the same time, however,
the character of color symbolism changes almost imperceptibly: instead
of distinct, firmly codified color “meanings,” we are now faced with
fascinating but somewhat indistinct color evocations. Conventional color
symbolism becomes more of a psychological experience. The age of
subjectivity has begun.

NOTES

1. See above, pp. 97 ff.

2. See Winckelmann’s Werke, herausgegeben von C. L. Fernow, (Dresden, 1808), I, p.
56. “That painter who thinks further than his palette wishes to have a learned
stock to which he can turn to take important signs, made sensual, of things that
are not sensual. A complete work of this kind does not yet exist. . . .”

278
 The Symbol

. The Versuch is printed in Wickelmann’s Werke, Il (Dresden, 1808), pp. 429-762.

Figures in parentheses, given in the text, refer to the page numbers of this edition.
So far as | know, there is no English translation of the Versuch.
. Winckelmann expressed these views frequently. See, for instance, Wickelmann’s
Werke, I, pp. 56 fh, 59 ff.
. See Winckelmann’s Werke, 1, pp. 53 ff.
. B. A. Sorensen, Symbol und Symbolismus in den dsthetischen Theorien des 18. Jahrhunderts
und der deutschen Romantik (Copenhagen, 1963).
. For Cesare Ripa and Pierio Valeriano, see Theories of Art, pp. 263 ff. Jean Baptiste
Boudard was a professor at the Royal Academy in Parma. His major work,
Iconologie tirée de divers auteurs. Ouvrage utile aux gens de lettres, aux poétes, aux artistes,
et généralement 4 tous les amateurs des beaux-arts (Vienna, 1766), was both learned
and well illustrated, and quickly achieved great popularity. Cf. Ludwig Volkmann,
Bilderschriften der Renaissance (Leipzig, 1923), pp. 106-108.
. See above, pp. 119 ff.
. The major documents of the dispute were collected by Ernst Howald in his Der
Streit um Creuzers Symbolik (Tiibingen, 1926).
. The reference to the Symbolik, in the first editon, are from this point on given in
parentheses in the text, Roman numerals indicate the volume. For Creuzer’s
views, cf. Marc-Matthieu Munch, La ‘Symbolique’ de Friedrich Creuzer (Association des
publications prés des universités de Strasbourg, fasc. 155), (Paris, n. d.).
. Because Creuzer’s translation is not precisely literal, | have adapted his wording
rather than make a correct translation of Demetrios. For the original text, see
Demetrios, On Style, ## 99-100.
. The term “iconism” (lkonismus) is one Creuzer himself employs (I, p. 81). 1 am
not aware of earlier occurences. Creuzer himself does not seem to employ it again
(but I may be mistaken).
. By Arnaldo Momigliano, in “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography,” Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946): 152-163, reprinted in the author’s
Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), pp. 75—90.
. In his Idee und Probe alter Symbolik (1806). This work was not available to me while
writing the present chapter.
. Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by S. MacKenna (London, n. d.), p. 427. And see
Theories of Art, ja) Se
. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New
York, 1964), p. 7. For information on the attitudes of the German right, particu-
larly Nazi ideologists, to Bachofen, see Lionell Gossman, “Orpheus philologus:
Bachofen versus Mommsen on the Study of Antiquity,” in Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, vol. 73, part 5 (1983), p. 6.
1 See Campbell’s introduction to Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of
J. J. Bachofen (Princeton, 1967), p. xxv. This seems to be the only edition of (a
selection) of Bachofen’s writings in English. Hereafter it will be cited as Myth,
Religion.
. Myth, Religion, pp. 11 f.

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 Modern Theories of Art

. Translated from C. A. Bernoulli, Urreligion und antike Symbole: Systematische Auswahl

aus Bachofens Werken (Leipzig, 1926), I, p. 274. Bachofen wrote this passage in the
report of his journey to Greece (1851). See also J. J. Bachofen, Mutterrecht und
Urreligion, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg (Stuttgart, 1984), p. xiv.
. Myth, Religion, p. 22.
Qe Ibid., p. 59.
22. Ibid., A 56. Bachofen probably has Plutarch’s De Iside et Isiride, Chapters 49-64,
in mind. That Bachofen should have felt a special attraction to Plutarch, a writer
of the late first and early second century A.D., who combined great interest in
Oriental (Egyptian) mysteries with his Greek culture, is in itself remarkable, and
deserves further study. Gt Kippenberg’s introduction to Mutterrecht und Urreligion,
pp. xvi ff
23: Myth, Religion, p. 56.
24. By C. A. Bernoulli, in Johann Jakob Bachofen als Religionsforscher (Leipzig, 1924), p.
As.
25: Myth, Religion, p. St.
26. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
2g. Theories ofArt, pp. 281 f., 343.
28. Lessing suggested this idea several times. See, for example, Laocodn, Chapters II
and XVII. And cf. also David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoén: Semiotics and Aesthetics
in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984), p. 121.
dey. See The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, translated by |
Su
Millington (London, 1860), pp. 66 ff.
30. F. W. F. v. Schelling, Schriften zur Philosophie der Kunst, ed. O. Weiss (Leipzig,
1911), p. 192. | am not aware of an English translation.
Sie Salomon Gessner, Brief iiber die Landschaftsmalerey an Herrn Fuesslin (1770), reprinted
in Salomon Gessner, Schriften, II] (Zurich, 1795), pp. 291-328. For Cennino
Cennini’s advice, see his The Craftman’s Handbook: I] libro dell’arte, translated by D.
V. Thompson, Jr. (New York, 1933), Chapter 88. And cf. Theories ofArt, pp. 118
ff. :
32. Maler Miiller, /dyllen (Leipzig, 1914), pp. 9 ff And cf. H. von Einem, Deutsche
Malerei des Klassizismus und der Romantik: 1760 bis 1840 (Munich, 1978), p. 41.
33: See Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schénen Kiinste (Leipzig, 1793), pp.
145-154.
34, The long article, “Uber die Landschaftsmalerei,” was originally published in Der
’

teutsche Merkur (1803), pp. 527-557 and 594-640. It is reprinted in Rémische

Studien, I (Zurich, 1806), pp. 11-130. I am quoting from the reprinted version.
35: “Uber die Landschaftsmalerei,” p. 95.
36. See von Einem, Deutsche Malerei, p. 61.
37h: “Uber die Landschaftsmalerei,” pp. 24 ff.
38. Cf. Rudolf Zeitler, Klassizismus und Utopie (Figura, $) (Stockholm, 1954), pp. 35 ff.
And see also Marjorie H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The
Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, N.Y., 1959), for the general
background.
 The Symbol

39) “Uber die Landschaftsmalerei,” in “Philipp Hackert: Biographische Skizze,” in

Goethe’s Werke, Sophienausgabe, Part I, Vol. 46, pp. 356-375. A first edition
appeared in a volume of Goethe’s works in Tiibingen, 1811.
40. Carl Grass, ““Einige Bemerkungen iiber die Landschaftsmalerei,” Morgenblatt fur
gebildete Stdande, December 22/23 (1809), pen t2t7—12165 1223—1224:
alc C. G. Carus, Lebenserinnerungen und Denkwiirdigkeiten, (Leipzig, 1865), I, p. 70. So
far as I know, there is no extensive discussion of Carus as a theoretician of art.
Hans Kern, Die Philosophie des Carl Gustav Carus (Celle, 1926), does not even
mention the author’s concern with art theory. E. Wasche, Carl Gustav Carus und
die romantische Weltanschauung (Diisseldorf, 1933), pp. 101-127, discusses the
theory of landscape, but is not very useful for our purpose. The dissertation by B.
Kirchner, Carl Gustav Carus: seine ‘poetische Wissenschaft’ und seine Kunsttheorie, sein
Verhdltnis zu Goethe und seine Bedeutung fur die Literaturwissenschaft (Bonn, 1962), pp.
36-43, also refers to his discussion of landscape painting, but does so from the
point of view of the literary historian.
42. N. Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present (Cambridge, 1940), p. 118.
43. C. G. Carus, Briefe iiber Landschaftsmalerei (Heidelberg, 1972, a reprint of the second
edition, 1835), pp. 37 ff. All page numbers, given in parentheses in the text, refer
to this edition.
44, See, for example, M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition (London, Oxford, New York, 1971), pp. 218-225; and Thomas
McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, 1981), pp. 34-43.
45. See Kern, Die Philosophie des Carl Gustav Carus, pp. 37 ff.
46. To be sure, that meaning could be complex, it could have different shades; a
certain motif, in combination with others, could assume a meaning quite different
from what it would have if it had been viewed in isolation. But all these
qualifications, one should bear in mind, do not abrogate the basic pattern of
mythographic thought, namely, that a given figure has a certain meaning.
47. See C. G. Carus, Die Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt (Leipzig, 1853).
48. See, for instance, Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(New York, 1953), pp. 302-347; and Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt
(Frankfurt a. M., 1981).
49. Particularly in his The Analysis of Beauty. | here quote from Anecdotes of the celebrated
William Hogarth, ed. John Nichols (London, 1813), in which The Analysis of Beauty
is reprinted on pp. 101-262.
50. As quoted in L. Forster, Biographische und literarische Skizzen aus dem Leben und der
Zeit Karl Férsters (Dresden, 1846), pp. 156 f. And see also von Einem, Deutsche
Malerei, pp. 92 ff.
51. Quoted from H. von Einem, “Die Symbollandschaft der deutschen Romantik,” in
the author’s Stil und Uberlieferung: Aufsdtze zur Kunstgeschichte des Abendlandes (Diis-
seldorf, 1971), p. 210.
Syd. Quoted in H. Borsch-Supan, Deutsche Romantik (Munich, 1972), p. 76; and H. von
Einem, Deutsche Malerei, p. 92.
Sys See Friedrich der Landschaftsmaler: Zu seinem Geddchtnis (Dresden, 1841). This little

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 Modern Theories of Art

pamphlet, edited and partly written by Carus, also contains some fragments of
Friedrich’s literary observations. For the sentence quoted, see p. 11.
54. Friedrich der Landschaftsmaler, p. 19.
55. Ibid., p. 24.
56. See below, pp. 296 ff.
bie See Theories of Art, p. 218.
58. Friedrich der Landschaftsmaler, p. 18.
59: See F. T. Vischer, Asthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schénen, zum Gebrauch von Vorlesungen
(Stuttgart, 1847-1857; a second edition appeared in 1922-1923). References to
the first edition will be given in the text, in parentheses, Roman numerals refer
to the volume.
60. See F. T. Vischer, Kritische Gdnge (Tiibingen, 1844), I, pp. 207-287. See particu-
larly pp. 222-224.
61. Vischer, Kritische Gange, I, p. 223.
62. See Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber Aesthetik (Berlin, 1837), Ill, p. 10; and the English
translation (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford, 1975]), p.
798. See also Aesthetik, II, p. 258, and Aesthetics, p. 625.
63. The original text reads: “Ein Maler, dessen Landschaft nicht so auf uns wirkt,
dass uns irgendwie zu Mute wird, hat nichts geleistet.”
64. See Theories of Art, pp. 355 ff.
65. John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London, 1892), Lecture VI, esp. pp. 150 ff.
Excerpts are now easily accessible in Elizabeth G. Holt, From the Classicists to the
Impressionists: A Documentary History of Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century
(Garden City, N.Y., 1966), pp. 22 ff. The sentences quoted are on p. 25.
66. Said in his first work, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and
Sculpture. 1 quote from Winckelmann’s Werke, ed. C. L. Fernow (Dresden, 1808), I,
pp. 23, 24, 38.
67. The full title reads “Sendschreiben iiber die Gedanken: Von der Nachahmung der
griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst,” as it appears in Winckel-
mann’s Werke, 1, pp. 63—116. For the sentence quoted, see p. 97.
68. The literature on this subject is wide, but has not been properly presented for
handy use. But see the recent volume, edited by A. Portmann and R. Ritsema,
The Realm of Colour - Eranos 41-1972 (Leiden, 1974).
69. See particularly the article by Ernst Benz, “Die Farbe im Erlebnisbereich der
christlichen Vision,” Eranos 41-1972, pp. 265-323.
70. The first English translation, The Principle of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and their
Applications to Art, was published in 1854. There were two translations in the
nineteenth century, each going into three editions.
TAR Philipp Otto Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, (Hamburg, 1840-1841). A facsimile
edition was published in Gottingen in 1965.
Tx H. Steffens, Was ich erlebte (Munich, 1956), p. 213. The original edition appeared
in Breslau, 1844, in ten volumes.
Ws See the chapter on this subject in Rudolf M. Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp

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 The Symbol

Otto Runge: A Study in Nineteenth Century Art Theory and Iconography (De Kalb, IIl.,
1970), pp. 86-96.
714, Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 1, p. 80, from a letter written December
22, 1807.
And see Bisanz, pp. 68 ff.
US Goethe's Theory of Colours, translated from the German with notes by Charles Lock
Eastlake (London, 1840). The figures in parentheses given in the text are the
numbers of the paragraphs. The paragraphs are numbered in both the German
original and the English translation.
76. See Theories ofArt, pp. 291 ff., esp. p. 298.
TH. The Greek term that Goethe used is a Plotinian concept, well known in the
Neoplatonic tradition. Athanasius Kircher (1601/2—1680), Jesuit, scientist, and
the most famous Egyptologist of his century, claimed—in Neoplatonic vein—
that the Egyptians were the source of Plato’s philosophy and the wisdom of
Pythagoras. Goethe is referring to Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Rome, 1646),
in which he described the colors as “the children of light and shadow.” This work
by Kircher is permeated by traditional Neoplatonic thought.
78. See Enneads V,8,1 and V,8,5. 1 am quoting the English version of MacKenna. See
Plotinus: The Enneads (London, n. d.), pp. 422 ff, 426.
WP. See William S. Heckscher, “Goethe im Banne der Sinnbilder: Ein Beitrag zur
Emblematik,” in Emblem und Emblematikrezeption, ed. S$. Penkart (Darmstadt, 1978),
pp: 355-385.
80. I am here using the Berlin edition, 1879, of Goethe’s Werke, Vol. 34 Naturwissenschaf-
tliche Schriften, III, pp. 259 ff, esp. p. 261.
81. We know, however, that he did practice painting, and even arrived at some
proficiency in it. For Goethe’s familiarity with, and attitude to, the visual arts, see
Herbert von Einem, Goethe-Studien (Munich, 1972).
82. For Gerard de Lairesse, see above, pp. 57 ff.
83. Goethe's Theory of Colour, p. 264.
84. See Ludwig Richter, Lebenserinnerungen eines deutschen Malers: Selbstbiographie nach
Tagesbuchnachschriften und Briefen (Leipzig, 1909). I shall quote from this edition,
giving the page numbers in the text (in parentheses). The copy I use is a reprint
of the “Volksausgabe des Diirerbundes,” that is, of a popular series. The work
originally appeared in 1884, and two years later, in 1886, there was already a
fourth edition.
85. For some of the literature, ancient and modern, on this subject, see my forthcom-
ing study “Renaissance Color Conventions: Liturgy, Humanism, Workshops.”
Originally a lecture at a symposium, and will be included —as an article—in the
volume that resulted from that symposium (held in Philadelphia, Pa.).
86. Cf. Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting: A Study in Comparative Ideas from Turner
to Schoenberg (New York, 1973), esp. Chapter I.

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 5
The Artist

The century between 1750 and 1850, so we are accustomed to believing,

opened up a new period in Western history. In the domain of the
present study—attitudes to, and the interpretation of, the visual arts
—the Enlightenment and Romanticism, those complex and multifa-
ceted historical movements, indeed marked the emergence of a new
stage. The revolution brought about by these movements affected every
corner and aspect of the philosophy of art and of art criticism. It may
seem obvious, yet it is not superfluous to emphasize again that in no
respect was the upheaval more radical than in its effect on views of the
artist. A new image emerged, far from simple or unequivocal, yet
powerful and enduring; it is still with us today.
The “image of the artist,” the conceptual label used here to designate
a broad and unwieldly complex of attitudes, beliefs, and ideas, should
not be taken in any narrowly limited sense. What we are here con-
cerned with is not only the artist’s social and legal position—an aspect
that has attracted the attention of students dealing with late medieval
and Renaissance art. In the period of Enlightenment and Romanticism,
the “image of the artist” affects other, and broader, fields. It largely
concerns the artist as a psychological type, and his relation to his work.

284.
 The Artist

int HICOsORHERS ANID POETS

1. WILLIAM DUFF

Fascination with the artist’s creativity and productive imagination was

of course not an eighteenth-century invention. Yet in the second half of
that century the problem acquired a significance it had hardly enjoyed
in previous periods, becoming the central issue in the aesthetic reflec-
tions of Romanticism. This intensive concern with the artist’s creative
nature did not emerge first in the theory of the visual arts. Even when
a painter or sculptor was the subject of discussion, the question of how
an artist produced a work of art out of shapeless material did not arise,
at this period, in the workshops or academies of art, and was not posed
by an artist holding a brush or a chisel. In the eighteenth century the
subject was mainly the province of philosophers and teachers of poetry,
and from there was brought to bear on the painter’s and sculptor’s
work. An interesting and significant document of this turn of mind in
eighteenth-century Europe is William Duff’s Essay on Original Genius
(1767). William Duff (1732-1815) was a Presbyterian minister, prolific
writer, and an important representative of the Scottish school of philo-
sophical thought. The Essay surely represents his principal claim to
fame.
That Willaim Duff was deeply rooted in the classical tradition goes
without saying (the authors he most frequently quotes are Aristotle and
Quintilian). It should be added, however, that he was also seriously
concerned with the discussions of problems in psychology that were
going on in his day. In fact, it is the combination of his two major
sources, Classical learning and “contemporary” psychological discussion,
that formed his particular approach to the arts. He had no immediate
connection or particular familiarity with the arts themselves. What
occupied his mind was the general problem of creativity and genius; the
arts were only the field where this problem could best be studied.
“The empire of genius,” William Duff believed, “is unbounded”
(91),' but his major concern was with poetry. “Poetry, of all the liberal
arts,” he assures his readers, “affords the most extensive scope for the
display of Genius truly Original” (124~25). Yet he also considers some

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of the other arts. “Though it is Poetry that affords the amplest scope
for the exertion of the powers of Imagination,” he says in a later
chapter, ‘“‘a very high degree of this quality may be discovered in some
of the other fine arts” (188). The notion of “art,” it should be kept in
mind, is still fairly traditional in his usage; it encompasses philosophy,
science, and also some of the mechanical arts. Yet, differing from the
mainstream of the terminology accepted in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries, it also includes part of the “fine arts.” Of these, he
says, “the art of Painting claims our first attention” (189). Painting,
then, is also a recognized field for the display of genius, imagination,
and the creative faculties.
Although the artist’s creativity is the central issue of Duff’s thought,
he chooses a psychological term to describe his theme, speaking mainly
of imagination. “That Imagination is the quality of all others most
essentially requisite to the existence of Genius will universally be
acknowledged,” he says at the beginning of the treatise (6). But what
precisely is imagination, particularly with regard to the artist? Our
author’s answer, though clearly indicating a direction of thought, is not
without a certain ambiguity. “Imagination is that faculty whereby the
mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the
various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation,
and treasured up in the repository of memory, compounding or disjoin-
ing them at pleasure; and which, by its plastic power of inventing new
associations of ideas, and of combining them with infinite variety, is
enabled to present a creation of its own, and to exhibit scenes and
objects which never existed in nature” (6-7). Imagination, we under-
stand, does two things. On the one hand, it assembles images (what
Duff, perhaps influenced by the Greek of Plato, calls “ideas””) and stores
them in a repository, ready for use. The historian of art theory will
remember Diirer’s ‘“‘assembled hidden treasure in the heart,”* a de-
scription of what Duff calls the “repository.” On the other hand,
imagination also produces the radically new, it conjures up “scenes and
objects which never existed in nature.” The idea of a repository, and of
reviving stored-up images in different combinations, is one that is very
much in accord with the associationist psychology of Duff’s time and
school.? The idea of creating the radically new, though certainly not

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new in itself, is the more important part of Duff’s theory, and it is the
part that had the greatest impact on theories of art in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Genius, to Duff, means creativity, which is synonymous with “origi-
nal.” By “the word Original when applied to Genius, we mean that
native and radical power which the mind possesses, of discovering
something new and uncommon in every subject on which it employs its
faculties” (86). Every genius, then, is original. However, “original ge-
nius” refers only to the degree of the creative faculty: “the word
Original, considered in connection with Genius, indicates the Degree,
not the Kind of this accomplishment, and ... it always denotes its
highest degree” (87).
Duff uses yet another term to denote the inventing, mold-shaping
function of the genius’s fantasy: he speaks of “plastic” imagination.
Thus, ‘“‘a vigorous, extensive, and plastic imagination is the principal
qualification of genius,” he says (58). “Extensive” here probably refers
to the range of images assembled in the repository of memory, while
the adjective “‘plastic,” ” it seems, indicates the very ability to invent, to
create a mold where originally there was none. The latter is a specific
quality of the genius’s mind, and it should not be confused with
imagination as such. Genius, Duff says, “is characterized by a copious
and plastic, as well as by a vivid and extensive Imagination.” And as if
he felt that these terms were not self-explanatory, he adds: “by which
means it [the imagination] is especially qualified to invent and create, or
to conceive and describe in the most lively manner the objects it
contemplates” (47). The inventive imagination, the ability to create an
image out of nothing, is the ultimate criterion of genius.
In poetry, as we already know, the imagination of genius ‘“‘is alto-
gether absolute and unconfined” (125). What are the imagination’s
power and significance in the visual arts? Duff considers painting only.
In a lengthy footnote, amounting to an independent little article (191—
198), he compares the imagination of the poet and of the painter. The
tradition of ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so in poetry), seeing literature
and the visual arts as close parallels, was still a live, unquestioned reality
in the mid-eighteenth century. The modern reader is, therefore, not
surprised to find Duff immediately proclaiming that a very close affnity

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 Modern Theories of Art

prevails between the poet and the painter. But there are also differ-
ences, and in discussing how a poet differs from a painter our author
foreshadows some modern trends of thought. “In most respects,” we
are told, poetry and painting are similar. It is the task of both to
represent “human characters, passions, and events.” To do this, both
the poet and the painter employ imagination. But they use it to a
different extent and in a different manner.
Let us first look at the extent to which the imagination is used. “A
greater compass of Fancy is required in the Poet than in the Painter.”
The reason for this is the different way in which the two artists shape
their works. The poet, Duff claims, must encompass a greater amount
of reality than the painter. The object of his description does not stand
still; what he wishes to show us are “fleeting objects,” ever-changing
situations. It is from these objects and configurations that the poet must
“catch the evanescent form.” The painter, on the other hand, is not
involved in an unceasing struggle with the vanishing of his objects, he
does not have to extract a form from fleeting, disappearing sights and
events. He is rather “‘ingrossed by that single idea,” whatever it may be,
which he intends to express in his picture. Duff is referring here, of
course, to the well-known idea that the structure of poetry follows the
sequence of time, whereas the structure of painting is based on the
simultaneity characteristic of spatial perception. This idea, needless to
say, had frequently appeared in the preceding centuries, and it attained
crucial significance in the decades that followed An Essay on Original
Genius.* Duff approaches this familiar topic in a rather unusual way. The
temporality of poetry as well as the simultaneity of painting were
usually taken to refer to the modes in which a work in the respective
art is experienced. We read the poem word after word, while we see all
the parts of the picture at the same instant. Poem and picture exist, as
it were, in different dimensions. What Duff says is something different.
He does not deal with the mode of the work’s existence; he asks rather
how it comes into being.
It is not the whole art of painting, however, to which Duff accords
the gift of imagination. The idea of a hierarchy of pictorial genres, one
may be surprised to see, proves of enduring vitality. There are, we read,
‘inferior departments in the art of Painting,” to be omitted from the

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 The Artist

discussion as “foreign to our purpose” (189 f.). The noblest part of

painting is, not surprisingly, history painting, and it is only there that
the distinctions concerning “original genius” apply. They “will exclude
all portraits in Painting, however excellent,” they will also exclude
“many descriptive pieces in poetry, though copied from nature, from
any pretensions to originality, strictly considered” (190). The history
painter, as well as the epic poet, take their theme from “an authentic
or traditional relation of some important event,” that is, from tradi-
tional lore, but what traditon provides them with is only the “ground-
work of the picture,” or, as we might say, the subject matter. “The
,

superstructure however must in both cases be the work of those

ingenious Artists themselves” (196 f.). If an artist, for instance, takes the
“groundwork” from Scripture (what Duff calls “the sacred Writings”),
he finds only a short description; “the Painter must imagine the rest”
(199).
This restriction of original genius to history painting, and to epic
poetry, perhaps more precisely indicates what Duff understands by
“originality.” It is the power of comprehensive invention, or, to use the
medieval term, creatio ex nihilo. Painted portraits, and descriptive poetry,
“may discover great vivacity and strength of Imagination; but as there
is no fiction, nothing invented in either, they can only be regarded at
best as the first and most complete copies of true originals” (190).

2 SUEZER

The problem of creative genius preoccupied thinkers in all the centers

of intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe. Though they all
dealt with the same problem, their attempts to unriddle the mystery of
how a genius produces a new reality took different forms. The contri-
bution of the Swiss school, particularly that of Johann Georg Sulzer
(1720-1779), is significant both as a reflection of how the problem was
seen in another part of Europe, and as a source of continuing influence.
Like William Duff, Sulzer was not primarily interested in the visual
arts; his main concern was with literature. His discussion of how a
genius shapes his work had a broad impact on the thought of his time;
it also shaped the thinking of painters and sculptors.

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 Modern Theories of Art

The historical context of Sulzer’s doctrine is the need to argue against

the most famous and most deeply rooted interpretation of art, namely,
as the imitation of nature. In the eighteenth century, the age-old
imitation theory of art was reformulated in Batteaux’s popular work,
Les beaux-arts réduits 4 un méme principe (The fine arts reduced to a single
principle).° The principle at the basis of the fine arts, says Batteaux, is
the imitation of beautiful nature. It is this principle that Sulzer rejects.
“In my dictionary [that is, the systematic work] I shall show,” Sulzer
wrote to a friend in 1756, “that Batteaux’s principle is no principle at
all.” What Sulzer rejects is not the qualifying word “beautiful” (in
“beautiful nature”) but rather the basic idea itself: that art is an
imitation, and that the work of art emerges in a process of imitating an
external reality.°
But what can replace Batteaux’s principle? It is here that Sulzer’s
notion of a “pre-forming art” appears. As against the time-honored
theory, surrounded by the aura of Aristotelian authority, that art is
essentially an imitative activity, that it reproduces the images and
appearances of objects in nature, Sulzer suggests that art does not at all
imitate the individual object encountered in the outside world. To be
sure, art does follow nature, but it does so in a broad and general way,
not by portraying the objects that surround us, but rather by imitating
the manner in which nature acts and produces the objects and creatures
we see. The idea that “Nature” is not simply a collection of material
objects, that it is, rather, a comprehensive system of interacting forces
—this idea was not new. Creative nature was a well-known theme in
European thought on art.’ The juxtaposition of natura naturans (active
nature, creative forces) and natura naturata (passive nature, material
objects) was also employed in order to understand, and explain, the
mystery of the artist’s production. Sulzer, inheriting these thoughts
from former generations, believes that by “pre-forming” in his mind
the objects and shapes he will later represent in his works, the artist
acts like Nature herself.
Sulzer’s notion of a “pre-forming art” clearly derives from Platonic
thought, even though his doctrine does not precisely correspond to
Plato’s system. The late eighteenth century here draws directly from
that great tradition of aesthetic reflection that was concerned with the

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artist’s idea, and that tradition, as we know,® was profoundly determined

by Platonic thought. It was from this tradition that the modern notion
of “ideal” emerged. Sulzer is one of the links connecting the tradition
of the artistic idea with the modern “Ideal” in aesthetics. He regards
the Ideal as the artistic vision from which the work of art emerges. “By
this word [Ideal] one expresses every original image (Urbild) of an object
of art which the artist’s imagination has shaped with some likeness to
natural objects, and after which he [the artist] works.”
Given these contexts and sources, one is not surprised to find that
Sulzer sharply distinguishes imagination from imitation, or the image
produced in the artist’s mind from the images he perceives in his visual
experience. The former, also called the Ideal, is the source and origin of
the work of art. “Of any object of art that has not been drawn after an
object present in nature but has received its essence and shape from the
artist’s genius, one can say that it is made after an Ideal,” says Sulzer.
This is so, it seems, even when the shapes seen in the work of art are
“similar” to the shapes of objects seen in nature.
Sulzer takes up, and strongly rejects, the age-old metaphor of paint-
ing as a mirror of nature. Originally the metaphor indicated how fully
and precisely the artist imitates nature. Thus, when Leonardo da Vinci
requires that the artist be a mirror, he wishes to emphasize the value of
the work of art when representing, fully and precisely, what one sees in
the outside world. To Sulzer the mirror has an altogether different
meaning: he sees in it the passive reflection of what happens to stand in
front of us, the lack of spontaneity. The artist, he says, is not a “dead
mirror.” The mirror cannot help reflecting precisely, without change or
transformation, what happens to be in front of it. The artist does the
very opposite: he spontaneously produces his object, and he may
therefore be said to act as Nature acts.
Emphasizing the productive, creative nature of genius in art leads
Sulzer to a discussion of still another ancient theme. This is the so-
called ‘‘election doctrine,” which attempts to explain how the artist is
,

capable of producing a perfect, “ideal” form. Ever since Antiquity it has

been suggested that the artist chooses the most beautiful and most
appropriate parts in nature, and combines them into one single figure.
Best known is the story of the classical sculptor who, given the task of

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 Modern Theories of Art

carving an image of Aphrodite, chose the five most beautiful maidens,

and then copied from each of them “the most beautiful parts,” to
combine them into the ideal statue of the goddess.” This theory prevails
in a great deal of Renaissance and Baroque reflections on art. In the
eighteenth century, too, the election doctrine was the primary model
for explaining how an artist is capable of shaping an ideal form. Mengs,
himself a celebrated artist and president of the Roman Academy of Art,
as we have seen, upheld the orthodox doctrine. By the Ideal, he says
“the artist is understood, to make a good selection in nature, not to
invent new things.” =e
Here, one is not surprised to find, Sulzer sharply disagrees. To be
sure, the artists who, “‘with consideration and taste, choose the best in
nature” are superior to those who “stick precisely to nature, and pick
the objects [models] they need as these happen to be encountered,
without selecting the better ones.” Yet even those artists who have
“consideration and taste” do not reach the zenith of art. To the highest
class belong only those artists to whom, as Sulzer put it, “nature can no
longer be sufficient, and who, by the creative power of their genius,
shape ideal forms of their own.”
Sulzer seems to have held—though he was never quite clear in this
respect—that he had a different view of the nature of the Ideal from
that accepted in his time. To Winckelmann, the Ideal primarily indi-
cates perfection, the full attainment of the aim. The art of the ideal,
therefore, is roughly concomittant with rendering the essential in na-
ture, the complete and typical character of the phenomena we experi-
ence. It was this aim that Greek art achieved with flawless purity.
Sulzer, on the other hand, stressed time and again that the true Ideal
transcends Nature. What he probably meant by this was not only that
the Ideal does not depend on the individual object or shape in nature
(that would have been generally accepted), but that it does not derive
from Nature at all, even if we understand Nature as an overall system.
Pefection in art, the very essence of the Ideal, he says, derives not from
nature but from genius. Perfection is a quality by which “the works of
great artists acquire a power higher than the one found in the natural
objects of taste and emotion.”'! Only men of great genius, our author
claims, are able to produce ideal shapes, superior to nature in perfec-

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 The Artist

tion. Goethe ridiculed Sulzer’s views; his ideal shapes, the great poet
said, hover “high up, in the empyrean of transcendental beautiful
value.” '* While Sulzer’s attempt to detach the Ideal from nature invites
criticism, it nevertheless shows where the focus of his thought, and
largely that of his generation, lay.

3. WACKENRODER
In reading William Duff and Johann Georg Sulzer, we have seen the
beginnings of a Romantic theory of art. This theory reached a climax in
the thought of a young German writer, Wilhelm Heinrich Wacken-
roder. His literary work was composed during a very short span, from
1792 to February 1798, when he died at the age of twenty-five. In
quantity, Wackenroder’s work is rather limited: including letters and
travel diaries, it consists of no more than five hundred small printed
pages. The modest volume of this oeuvre, however, stands in marked
contrast to its influence, in breadth as well as in depth, on intellectual
life in Europe, and particularly on the spiritual climate of discussions of
art during most of the nineteenth century.
Wackenroder’s impact was felt in many fields. He is one of the
founders of a particular literary genre, the “novel of the artist” (Kiin-
stlerroman), that lives on to our own day. He played an important part
in engendering a renewed interest in early German art, particularly
Diirer. His image of that artist will hardly be accepted by the historian
(he pictured Diirer, the great humanist who admired Italy and was
attracted to the new message coming from it, as a deeply pious artisan
who humbly clung to the supposed local traditions of workmanship),
but it exerted a profound influence. Wackenroder strongly influenced
the pre-Raphaelite movement in painting and its literary interpreters.
His most important legacy, though it is difficult to pinpoint precisely, is
his contribution towards placing a new theme in the center of aesthetic
reflection—the theme of conflict between the artist and his audience,
or society. It is now common knowledge that this was to become a
central topos in Romantic thought on art, a cardinal part of the modern
world’s inheritance from Romanticism.
Wackenroder’s emotional style— effusive in wording, exalted in tone

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 Modern Theories of Art

—does not make for easy reading. The modern reader often wonders
how these texts could have had such an effect. Wackenroder’s best-
known composition, the Confessions from the Heart of an Art Loving Friar
(1797), reveals both the author’s views on painting and poetry and the
atmosphere he wishes to create in the contemplation of works of art.'?
The mask of an “art-loving friar” may well be assumed in answer to a
desire for anonymity. It also suggests how closely, in Wackenroder’s
view, art is related to religion. The writing is rich in connotation. What
it lacks in clarity of exposition and directness of statement, it makes up
in what may be called “atomspheric effect” and evocative power.
Wackenroder devotes a great deal of attention to the spectator’s
experience, and to what should be the beholder’s appropriate attitude
to the work of art he contemplates. It marks his historical position that
he takes it as a matter of course that the spectator’s experience is part
and parcel of the theory of art. The interest in the spectator’s experi-
ence should not however be mistaken for any kind of critical attitude.
On the contrary, with a truly religious fervor, he asks the spectator to
forego any criticism, not to pass judgment, but to open up his heart to
the work of art he is experiencing. Even praise of a painting is not a
proper attitude. “It is not sufficient to say in praise of a work of art: ‘It
is beautiful and excellent,’ for these general phrases apply to the most
varied works;— we must be able to surrender ourselves to every great
artist, look upon and comprehend the things of Nature, with his senses
and speak in his soul: ‘The work is correct and true in its way (1293 85).
neebe

As the spectator fervently desires to identify with the specific work of

art he is looking at, he necessarily gives up any attempt to compare it
with any other work of art; he resigns, as it were, his position outside
the work of art he is seeing. Experiencing a great work of art becomes
a kind of unio mystica.
The spectator who fully “surrenders” to the work of art before him,
Wackenroder was certain, is granted an intuitive grasp of its essence
and character. This notion, to be sure, is not discussed in theoretical
terms, but the belief reverberates through most of Wackenroder’s
writings. Our whole person, he suggests, takes part in intuitively grasp-
ing the work of art to which we are surrendering. In his article on
Diirer, included in the Confessions, we read: “All of the figures speak;

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they speak openly and with refinement. No arm moves superfluously or

merely to please the eyes and fill up the space; all of the limbs,
everything speaks to us as if with force, so that we comprehend with
genuine firmness the meaning and the soul of the entire picture. We
believe everything which the artistic man presents to us; it is never
blotted out of our memory” (113359). In devotedly experiencing a
picture we perceive its message, as we understand the will of God while
we are immersed in devotional contemplation. ‘I compare the enjoy-
ment of the more noble works of art to prayer,” said Wackenroder
(126379). Looking at a work of art has an affinity to witnessing a
revelation.
What precisely is it that is revealed in the work of art? After the
spectator has fully “surrendered” to the work he is contemplating, what
does he actually perceive? Put in less metaphorical terms, the question
might read: what are we looking for when we look at a work of art?
The answer is far from obvious. The reader notes that a considerable
part of Wackenroder’s literary legacy, particularly in the Confessions,
consists of descriptions of paintings. So significant is the part played by
these descriptions that one is tempted to see here a revival of ekphrasis,
that ancient literary genre that consisted of the description of—real or
imaginary — paintings. The Confessions even include a chapter on “How
and in what Manner one actually must regard the use of the Works of
the Great Artists of the Earth for the Well Being of his Soul” (125—
127). But if one now turns to his descriptions in the hope of finding
some information about the paintings described, one is bound to be
disappointed. Our author altogether neglected the material nature, the
sensory aspect of the paintings he was describing. In Wackenroder’s
Confessions, Heinrich Woelfflin noted, we do not find “descriptions” of
a specific painting, but rather poetic fantasies on a given subject."
What, then, does Wackenroder look for in a painting?
The answer to this question, I believe, shows, why Wackenroder
found such abundant echo in the culture of Romanticism. What the
spectator looks for, and indeed finds, in a painting are not the material
or formal components of the painting itself; the true subject of the
spectator’s vision, in Wackenroder’s view, is the personality of the
artist. The work of art, it turns out, is only a stepping-stone on our way

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to the artist, a medium through which we can meet him. An article on

Albrecht Diirer, published posthumously in Fantasies on Art for Friends of
Art (1799) (and not to be confused with the article on Diirer included
in the Confessions), opens with a remarkable statement: “It is a delightful
matter to recreate in one’s mind an artist deceased long ago from the
works which he left behind and, from amidst all the various lustrous
beams, find the focal point to which they lead back or, rather, the
heavenly star from which they emanated. Then we have before us the
World Soul of all creations, —a poem of our imagination, from which
the actual life of the man is completely excluded” (164): Not only are
we not looking for dates, authroship, or any other kind of “external”
information; in truth, we are not even looking at lines, brush strokes,
or chisel marks. The best way of seeing a picture, it appears, is to look
through it. Before the works of Raphael, Wackenroder says, you forget
that there are colors and an art of painting (91). A Renaissance artist
might have continued such an exclamation by claiming that you forget
the art of painting because you believe the objects in the picture to be
real objects. Not so Wackenroder. You forget that there is an art of
painting, he thought, because you encounter the artist directly. Looking
at a picture, we are in a semimystical way perceiving the creative artist
himself. It is with him, with the rich life of his soul, that the spectator
is identifying.
A central theme in Wackenroder’s thought is the process—or, if
you will, the mystery—of artistic creation. His fascination with Ra-
phael, Leonardo, and Diirer is not focused on the individual products
of their genius (we have just mentioned how little attention he in fact
devotes to the specific work of art). But, in fact, he is also not very
much concerned with the individual character of the painter as a unique
human being or as a special psychological type, and he shows little
interest in the events of his life. What attracts him in these great artists
is their creative activity. He studies them in the hope that this will help
him to understand how the mind of an artist works, how he creates his
work.
The question is not new. The problem of the artist, in one way or
another, has occupied the mind of many periods. Since the sixteenth
century at least, the question of whether, or not, the artist is the true

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origin of his work had stirred philosophers and artists. It was asked:
how is it possible for the artist to produce his work, and how far, if at
all, does the work bear the imprint of his personality? Notwithstanding
the recurring concern, earlier periods did not provide a sufficiently
articulate framework for a thorough discussion of the creative act.
However one may consider the articulation of the concepts of creation
in the aesthetic thought of former ages, in Wackenroder the conceptual
framework, and even the terminology employed, belong to the religious
traditions of German Pietism.'® While he obviously does not use pietis-
tic notions to analyze artists as religious individuals, he found in that
tradition the conceptual tools for a discussion of creativity.
Looking back at Wackenroder’s work from a distance of two centu-
ries, it stands out for his attempt to shed light on the artist’s creative
act. Instead of conceiving of that act, which has puzzled so many
thinkers, as of an instant, a momentous, but shapeless illumination,
Wackenroder describes it as a structured process, the stages of which
can be distinguished separately. Our author was of course well aware
that the mystery of the creative act is one that the artist himself cannot
fully penetrate. He makes Raphael say to an imaginary pupil that he,
the great master himself, cannot explain how he paints his Madonnas
—‘not because it is a secret I would not want to disclose ... but
because I myself do not know it” (93). Wackenroder nevertheless
describes and analyzes, though implicitly rather than openly, what
happens when a painter produces a picture.
The creative process begins with a stage of half-conscious probing.
Wackenroder must have been one of the earliest authors to assume that
the process of artistic creation does not begin with a bright idea or
vision, but rather with a stage called “dark presentiment” (dunkle
Ahnung). In this stage, the artist does perceive something, some general
contour, of what the work of art will eventually represent and what it
will look like, but he perceives it in a blurred, confused, “dark” fashion.
The notion of “dark presentiment,” of a vague intuition as the begin-
ning of the artist’s labor, was not unheard of around the turn of the
century. Karl Philip Moritz, the influential philosopher of aesthetics and
poetics, speaks of a dunkle Ahnung through which the work materializes
in the poet’s mind.'° Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe, on the 27th of

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March 1801, of a dark, but powerful comprehensive idea (Totalidee) that

precedes all technical efforts. Wackenroder belongs to the same broad
school of thought. He stands out, however, by making “dark presenti-
ment” a full-fledged stage in the creative process, and by specifically
applying it to painting.
Wackenroder does not offer his views on the creative process as a
systematic doctrine; they are rather implied in his descriptions. Raphael,
for example, always desired to paint the Virgin, until finally he decided
to do so. Since that decision,

Day and night his mind had constantly worked on her picture in abstraction;
but he had not been able to perfect it at all to his satisfaction; it had always
seemed to him as if his fantasy were working in the dark . . . occasionally the
picture had fallen into his soul like a heavenly beam of light, so that he had
seen the figure before himself with vivid features, just as he wished it to be,
and yet, that had always been only a moment and he had not been able to
retain the conception in his mind. (84)

In that initial stage, the artist’s state of mind is one of restlessness,

anxiety, and pain. Raphael prays to the Virgin in his dream (84), the
musician Joseph Berglinger sheds tears. At this stage, the artist employs
different techniques designed to help him overcome the “darkness” of
his perception, and to make him arrive at an articulate form. Wacken-
roder uses Renaissance literature to picture the artist’s struggles in this
early stage of his work. Piero di Cosimo, so our author freely transcribes
Vasari and Leonardo, “frequently fixed his eyes rigidly on old, patched,
many-colored walls or on the clouds in the sky and, from such workings
of Nature, his imagination seized various fantastic ideas about wild
battles with horses or about huge mountain landscapes with strange
villages” (122).'’ The artist longs to be redeemed from the pain and
stress of that initial, “dark” stage of creation.
The second stage in the creative process, as Wackenroder saw it, can
be described as that of inspiration. It is mainly now that what is called
“creative imagination” comes into play. In the late eighteenth century
the theory of genius could not be fully separated from the doctrine of
creative imagination. The creative imagination itself was either rational-
istically explained as a maturing of memories (as by Sulzer) or it was

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considered a divine gift (as by the German philosopher Hamann).

Wackenroder is closer to Hamann. Sulzer’s explanation of genius, he
says in a letter of June 12, 1792, is “so frosty and superficial, so little
philosophical, as is everything of this kind in his work.” In fact,
Wackenroder also learned from Sulzer. However, in the matter of
inspiration he was following the doctrine of a divine source.
Inspiration, in the author’s view, is the moment at which the Ideal,
intuitively yet darkly felt in the first stage of the creative process,
appears to the artist’s vision, now it can be perceived by the’ senses.
The example adduced is, once again, Raphael. Wackenroder refers to
Baldassare Castiglione’s report of Raphael’s relying on “a certain mental
image” of feminine beauty residing in his soul in order to represent a
beautiful goddess. '* Modern students have noted that while Raphael
made this reference to a mental image in connection with depicting a
pagan goddess (Galatea), Wackenroder applies it to the representation
of a Madonna. The substitution of a Holy Virgin for a pagan goddess,
however, is not significant for our purpose. What remains in both cases
is the central characteristic of this stage: the following of a mental
image. Here the Romantic critic does indeed depart from his Renais-
sance source. Whereas Castiglione seems to consider the “certain men-
tal image” as a stable idea, Wackenroder describes it as a momentary
illumination, a kind of sudden revelation.
The clear vision, the sudden revelation, it is important to note, is not
immediately linked to the actual painting of the picture. Raphael
perceives the vision at night, in a dreamlike fashion. It “remained firmly
stamped on his mind and his senses for eternity.” Therefore, the artist
“succeeded in portraying the Mother of God each time just as she had
appeared to his soul” (84-85). The articulate vision marks a separate
stage in the creative process.
The modern critical student will of course note, possibly with some
scepticism, that the Virgin’s articulate “appearance, ” which does not
originate in the artist’s soul or mind, closely corresponds to what he
had “darkly” intuited in the first stage. Wackenroder felt this difficulty.
“The most wonderful aspect of all,” he says, “was that he [Raphael] felt
as if this picture [the one he saw in the dreamlike appearance] were
precisely the one which he had always sought, although he had only a

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dim and confused conception of it” (84). The marvel of this correspon-
dence can be understood only by assuming some outside agent, either a
divine plan or a Platonic idea, inspiring the artist during his struggles in
the “dark” period and “recognized” by him in the nocturnal appear-
ance. Based on the analysis of some metaphors, mainly of light, the
Platonic alternative has been suggested as the more likely one.!?
Be that as it may, the advent of the inspiration is a breakthrough, an
extraordinary experience that changes the artist’s life and perhaps also
his nature. Wackenroder speaks of the artist’s “consecration” (Weihe) in
the wake of this experience. Raphael, the reader is told, “had suddenly
started out of his sleep, violently disturbed. ... The divinity in the
picture had so overpowered him that he had broken out into hot tears.
... The next morning he had arisen as if newly born” (84). Experiencing
the inspiring vision is linked to a state of heightened consciousness.
Thus Wackenroder makes Raphael write to a supposed pupil that he
executed his pictures of the Virgin as if in a “pleasant dream (93). The
dreamlike character of his mental state indicates the unusual, supernat-
ural mode of consciousness. Wackenroder’s language in describing these
states is deeply influenced by the language of German Pietism, the
formulations often remind one of those of Jakob Boehme, the great
seventeenth-century mystic.” Boehme was popular in the literature of
German Romanticism, and Wackenroder may have been attracted to
him particularly because of his descriptions of a heightened state of
consciousness.
When the artist has experienced his inspiration, and after he has
perceived the clear and articulate vision, the work of art is not yet
shaped. This happens in the third stage of the creative process. It is the
stage in which the idea is materialized in matter, the picture is actually
painted. The basic requirements of this stage are skill and technique,
and Wackenroder’s attitude to them is ambivalent.
One is not surprised to find that he rejects rules, and that he sharply
criticizes the artist who exhibits formal effects for their own sake. He
praises Diirer for his “seriousness,” and juxtaposes this characteristic
?

against the fascination with formal display to which so many artists fall
victim. The discussion of artistic values here becomes a criticism of
society and a statement on the Romantic ideal of man. The more recent

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artists, Wackenroder writes, do not “want one to participate in that

which they portray for us; they work for aristocratic gentlemen, who
do not want to be moved and ennobled by art but [rather] dazzled and
titillated to the highest degree; they strive to make their paintings
specimens of many lovely and deceiving colors; they test their cleverness
in the scattering of light and shadow;—however, the human figures
frequently seem to be in the picture merely for the sake of the colors
and the light, I would indeed like to say, as a necessary evil” (113-114).
Manual dexterity and the mastery of artistic techniques, on the other
hand, can serve the manifestation of the spirit, making the artist’s vision
accessible to the beholder. In the introduction to his essay on Leonardo
da Vinci, Wackenroder warns the reader against those artists who,
“armed with superficial and fleeting pseudo-enthusiasm, take the field
against serious, well founded scholarship” (97). Our author extols
Leonardo’s “industrious observation” of the reality around him. Leo-
nardo knew that “the artistic spirit ought to . . . roam about assiduously
outside of itself and seek out all the forms of creation with agile
dexterity and preserve their shapes and imprints in the storehouse of
his mind” (99).
In spite of Wackenroder’s strong leaning towards what he calls “the
spiritual,” he does not altogether disregard that stage in the creative
process in which the painter actually paints the picture. Here, however,
he points to the danger of overevaluating the specific characteristics of
this stage—the virtuosity and “cleverness” of formal effects. Carefully
reading Wackenroder’s writings, one perceives that no such danger
exists with regard to the first stages of the process— dark intuition and
inspired vision. The execution of the work of art in the material
medium is the only part of the creative process that, while necessary, is
ambiguous in character.
Wackenroder even goes a step further. In considering the work of
art itself, he applies to it the distinction between “inner” and “outer,”
a distinction so popular in Romantic thought. In the real work of art as
we actually experience it—painted on canvas or carved in stone—he
looks for an inner kernel and an outer shell.
The distinction between “inner” and “outer,” ’ as one knows, ulti-
mately derives from the belief in the existence of a higher, “true” world

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of which the world of our senses is only an insufficient, pale reflection.

This distinction, a cornerstone of the Platonic tradition in European
thought, was also applied to beauty. Wackenroder shared this belief.
Every creature, he says, strives towards the beautiful, but it can never
go beyond itself. We perceive what we can see of beauty, never absolute
beauty itself. Only in moments of ecstatic intuition are we able to name
universal, original beauty, but we are not able to reproduce it. We are
always forced to content ourselves with our impressions. Therefore, a
multitude and variety of impressions rules our realm; only God can
perceive absolute beauty. “Just as a different image of the rainbow
enters into every mortal eye, so too does the surrounding world reflect
for each individual a different imprint of beauty. ... However, univer-
sal, original beauty ... reveals itself unto the One who created the
rainbow and the eye that beholds it” (111).
These ideas, we need hardly stress, were the common property of all
periods from the beginnings of Neoplatonism to Romanticism. Restating
them was, then, hardly a startling innovation. But Wackenroder sur-
prises the student by taking it for granted that the cosmic split between
“inner” and “outer” also applies to the individual work of art. To be
sure, it is often not easy to say in just what the “outside” of a painting
(or, for that matter, of a poem) consists, as opposed to its “inner”
being. Mainly, it would seem, the “outer” shell, or being, of an art
work is supposed to consist in its form, and in its materialization in a
specific medium. Everything that does not instantaneously emerge, but
is produced with reflective consideration would seem to the Romantics
as closer to the “external.” In the late eighteenth century, this notion
may have been linked with the theory of signs, particularly with the
distinction between what were then called the natural and the artificial
signs. Thus, Moses Mendelssohn believed that movements, tones, and
gestures are natural signs, being linked to the “thing itself,” whereas
language, being derived from deliberate agreement, is a system of
conventional signs.”' Wackenroder, like other Romantics, also considers
language as “external;” it is based on conventions that were deliberately
set up. The understanding of language also means to go beyond the
words and sentences themselves. This, in a sense, enhances the value of
the visual arts. “A precious painting,” so we read in his essay on how

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to experience works of art, “is not a paragraph of a textbook which,

when with a brief effort I have extracted the meaning of the words, |
then set aside as a useless shell; rather, in superior works the enjoyment
continues on and on without ceasing. We believe we are penetrating
deeper and deeper into them and, nevertheless, they continuously
arouse our sense anew and we foresee no boundary at which our soul
would have exhausted them” (127).
Statements like this make the notion of the “external” in a painting
even more problematic. If the visible appearance of a painting, its lines
and colors, its shapes and tones, cannot be set aside like a useless shell,
but rather continuously arouses our sense, does it mean anything to
describe it as “external”? In what way, indeed, is it external? Wacken-
roder never provides an answer, nor do the other Romantic authors
who, in one way or another, use, or allude to, this distinction with
regard to painting. There is a vague, though powerful, feeling of the
distinction between inner and outer in the picture, but this feeling
never crystallizes into conceptual clarity.
The concept of the painting’s “inner” nature is not much clearer or
easier to demonstrate than that of its “external” aspect. The “inner”
nature of a painting, it should be said at once, is not its contents, the
subject matter or theme, as opposed to the form, which might be seen
as external. The division between “inner” and “outer” does not corre-
spond to the division between subject matter and form. It has been
noted that when Wackenroder juxtaposes “inner” and “outer,” his
language becomes particularly vague. Nevertheless, it seems possible to
claim that his views of the “inner” nature of a painting oscillate between
two meanings, which, for want of better terms, may be called emotional
and metaphysical.
In one sense, then, the “inner” nature of a painting consists of the
emotions the picture conveys or evokes. Often Wackenroder equates
“inner” with human emotions or the human mind. Particularly in
speaking of works of music, he describes their “inner” nature as the
preserved emotional life, whether of the composer or the listener. But
for pictures, too, this interpretation is valid.
Another sense of the “inner” is less psychological and emotional, it
rather points to different levels of being. The inner nature of certain

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paintings, one feels in reading, is the manifestation, or perhaps the

embodiment, of a superterrestrial reality. The language of art, Wacken-
roder believes, reveals “things celestial,” or “the secrets of the skies.”
To be sure, it is not always clear what precisely he means by these
metaphors. Are the “things celestial” the infinity of the universe, or the
mysteries of a religious divinity? Though the answer is not clear-cut, it
is obvious that they are not identical with our emotional life, with our
subjective desires and longings. The “inner” may be elusive, it may not
be possible to grasp it, yet it is conceived as an objective reality.
In the end, it may not be essential to define the precise nature of the
“inner” being of the work of art. What is crucial is the feeling that
there is more than can be clearly expressed, that a work of art holds
more than meets the eye. What the division between “inner” and
“outer” ultimately leads to is the insight that the work of art is an
insufficient reflection of what it purports to represent.
It is not surprising that Romantics, so profoundly aware of the
rupture between hidden meanings and visible forms, were attracted by
the concept of the hieroglyph. Whenever one wished to indicate the
failure to transmit completely the inner experience or inkling in the
outer appearance, the image of the hieroglyph offered itself as a meta-
phor endowed with the authority and mystery of ancient, secret wis-
dom. The language of art, Wackenroder said, is “dark and mysterious,”
but it has a marvelous power over our mind and experience. “It speaks
through pictures of human beings and, therefore, makes use of a
hieroglyphic script.” We understand the symbols of this script, he says,
but only “in their external aspect” (119). All this reinforces the sensa-
tion of the unbridgeable gap between what is to be said and our ability
to say it. As a revelation of the divine, the painting is as insufficient as
the text. What it can do is to stir our emotions. Art “fuses spiritual and
representational qualities” in such a “touching and admirable manner
that, in response, our entire being and everything about us is stirred
and affected deeply” (119). The work of art, like the hieroglyph, does
not fully reveal the divine, but it affects our emotional being. If
the painting is not a true revelation, it is and remains an expressive
artifact.

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4. SOLGER
The development of reflection on art is a complex process, and it
sometimes yields surprising results. Thus it occasionally happens that
the most perfect expression of an intellectual leaning or a trend of
thought is found outside the mainstream and the great schools con-
sidered representative of that leaning or trend. This seems also to be
true for the Romantics’ idea of the artist’s creative imagination.
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Solger (1780-1819), an important figure in
the history of Romantic aesthetics, strays markedly from the main
current of German philosophy in the age between Kant and Hegel; he
also diverges significantly from the tradition of the painters’ reflections
on their art, as we know them from his contemporaries, Runge and
Caspar David Friedrich. But although Solger stands alone, his discussion
of the artist’s creative imagination is perhaps the most enthralling one
bequeathed by Romanticism to succeeding generations. What he has to
say on this problem also reveals, more than does any other treatment of
the theme, the questions and paradoxes that remained without solution.
Thus, though remaining outside the mainstream, Solger’s thought is a
landmark in the development of aesthetic reflection at a crucial stage in
its development.
Solger’s major work, Erwin: Vier Gesprache iiber das Schéne und die Kunst
(Erwin: Four Dialogues on the Beautiful and on Art), appeared in 1815.
His Vorlesungen iiber Aesthetik (Lectures on Aesthetics) appeared, posthu-
mously, in 1829.°* The Erwin, in many respects a strange work, refers
obliquely to some contemporary discussions, but the author never tells
us clearly what precisely they were. Although the book is cast in the
form of a dialogue (as the subtitle announces), its style is sometimes
abstract and obscure, which does not make it easy for the modern
reader to make out what these discussions were. Solger is a deductive
thinker who tries to derive complex results from original but very
general truths; the Erwin is perhaps the first deductive aesthetics ever to
be published. It is true that this work, like Solger’s system in general,
has little actually to offer by way of explaining specific paintings or
sculptures, but the ideas it proposes—albeit in an abstract and philo-

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sophic language—make an important contribution to our understand-

ing of Romantic, and modern, theory of the visual arts.
A central concept in Solger’s system, a notion from which he tries to
derive all the others, is “imagination” (Phantasie). Now, the notion of
imagination, we have had ample occasion to see, was frequently em-
ployed in aesthetic discussions of Romanticism, but several rather
different things could be meant by it. Solger, too, has more than just
one reading of the term. He distinguishes imagination (Phantasie) from
imaginative power (Einbildungskraft). The latter is a faculty of the soul
that, “departing from the real things and our experience of their
appearances, shapes from this material specific figures according to our
needs” (100).?* In other words, while “imaginative power’ is seemingly
a productive faculty, it is wholly subordinated to our natural drives and
passions (our “nature,” one might say), and it derives its material from
our individual sensual experience of nature.
Imagination proper (Phantasie) is given a different, rather speculative
interpretation. Possibly following some eighteenth-century leads,** Sol-
ger attempts to set apart a “higher” productive imagination from mere
‘imaginative power.” Only imagination is the organ of art. To be sure,
higher imagination encompasses more than art alone. For Solger, as for
some other Romantic thinkers, art and religion are linked to each other,
and their common bond is also reflected in the fact that imagination is
their common organ. Solger conceives imagination proper as the mirror
image of divine creativity. “The power within us that corresponds to
the divine creative power, or rather in which the divine powers come
to real existence in the world of appearances, is imagination” (199).
Imagination, so says Erwin, the primary interlocutor in the dialogue
that bears his name, is a “real [human] activity that is the revelation of
a divine one”’ (309).
Imagination, bridging the gap between the infinite and the finite, has
two faces, as it were, or, if you prefer, it moves in two opposite
directions. As “religious consciousness,” it is oriented towards the
“innermost of the divine,’ it tends towards God himself; as “artistic
bf

consciousness,” it is an outpouring from the “innermost of the divine”

into the world, and it brings out a whole cosmos of fantastic figures
and shapes (307). The action of the imagination, then, is not subject to

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the arbitrariness of human decision. As it encompasses the revelation of

the divine, its powers go beyond those of the human artist. It is for this
reason that Solger can call the religious and the artistic consciousness
“the prophets and interpreters of God” (210).
The artist’s task is to catch the images in the fantasy and to transform
them into stable objects that we (the audience) can perceive by our
senses. But the work of art, so it follows from Solger’s thought, is not
simply the result, or product, of imagination, a product divorced from
the activity that brought it into being. Imagination as a living motion,
as a process of unceasing creation, must somehow be present in the
completed work. To be sure, it is difficult for us to see this unity of the
cast form—the work of art—and the living motion, the creative
fantasy. But this difficulty only shows how weak our perception is. That
we distinguish between the idea and the work of art—this, Solger says,
merely derives from the nature of our thinking (218). But in fact the
work of art constantly refers to the act of creation. It is for this reason
that we conceive of the work of art as of a symbol. “In this sense,”
Erwin says to his partner in the dialogue, “all art is symbolic.” But as if
to preclude any other interpretations, he adds: “but in this sense only”
(218-219).
The symbol is a crucial notion in Solger’s thought. A great deal of
his aesthetic system rests on the distinction between what he calls
symbol and allegory, a distinction not unknown at the time. The
philosopher Schelling, generally considered to be Solger’s master (though
the relationship between them seems to have been rather complex),
suggested a differentiation between schema, allegory, and symbol.”° But
while Schelling conceives of the triad as “general categories,” applicable
to a wide variety of phenomena (nature, science), Solger limits them to
art.
Symbol and allegory, Solger believes, are universal modes of art. The
difference between them is not one of value—the one is not better or
worse than the other; it is a difference of nature. The symbol includes
“not only the completed work, but also the life and activity of the
forces [that brought it about] themselves” (223). It is, then, the unity of
the thing and the motion, of the product and the production. Allegory,
on the other hand, is closer to what we would today call a sign. The

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dividing line between these two modes of imaging and depicting, Solger
stresses, can rarely, if ever, be sharply drawn.”° What he means by this
distinction, particularly with regard to the visual arts, can best be seen
in his discussion of the examples he adduces.
“In the symbol we have an object in which the activity has saturated
and exhausted itself; the material, by letting us perceive the activity,
gives us the feeling of calm and perfection,” says Solger in the Vorlesun-
gen iiber Aesthetik (130). Such objects were created, in purest form, by
the Greeks. The Greeks did not create “pure forms [or] pure concepts,”
the directions into which the Idea disintegrates; they created “live
persons, defined from all sides,” he says in Erwin (227). “And what else,”
he continues, “‘is the essence of the symbol if not that intimate and
inseparable blending of the general and the particular into one and the
same reality?”
In the allegory the relationship between the general and the particu-
lar is different. The “intimate and inseparable blending” is gone, and
instead we have here a falling apart of the two components. Solger
stresses that the individual object does not necessarily stand for the
general idea; a generic object can also stand for a particular idea. To use
his examples: a particular nail can stand for the general idea of necessity,
but a human figure—in itself, the most general image in art—can
stand for a particular city (Vorlesungen, 133 ff.). Essential, then, is not the
direction, but the fact that the two components do not overlap. This is
best made manifest in Christian art. The idea, or the general meaning,
goes far beyond the specific figure that represents it. The supremacy of
the idea over the figure, of the general over the particular, characterizes
“modern,” ” that is, Christian, art. To be sure, a Christian allegorical
figure is not just a “sign,” the relationship between them is not
arbitrary, but it lives in a cleavage.
Symbol and allegory, we should remember, are not only characteris-
tic of great historical periods; they are also always courses of the
imagination. The artist, in principle, can approach reality, or his subject,
ina symbolic or an allegorical mode.

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5 haeOyVoie) eave6Ha We AS)

1. THE CHARACTER OF THE ARTISTS’ STATEMENTS

Romantic poets and philosophers, critics and literati, when discoursing

about art, seem to have moved on an exalted plane. Yet the air around
them, one cannot help feeling, was rather thin. They claimed for the
ideas they pronounced an almost universal validity; the notions they
employed were world-embracing. Yet often it seems that they have
little to do with the work of art as a real object, or with the painter’s
job, as we all know it. What then, one asks, did the artists themselves
have to say to this intellectual and emotional spiritualization of their
craft? Romantic reflection on painting is not of a kind to yield a simple,
clear-cut answer. And yet one cannot help formulating certain ques-
tions.
In studying the texts written by the artists themselves, one again
encounters ambiguous attitudes and statements. On the one hand, many
painters around 1800 were reflective and articulate. A sophisticated use
of words, in both oral and written form, was common among them.
Moreover, they obviously felt the need to account, to themselves as
well as to their audiences, for their aims and strivings and to explain
the principles that informed their efforts. On the other hand, they did
not write systematic expositions, nor did they set forth their views in
an orderly and didactic manner. Their literary legacy, as we now know
it, may be voluminous at times, but it is made up primarily of personal
documents, such as letters, diary entries, and confessions. It is not
surprising, then, that after studying many such confessions we still feel
the same, or an even greater, vagueness than the one we experienced
when we read the statements of the philosophers.
Some artists, to be sure, did present their views on painting in a
didactic fashion. An important example is Henry Fuseli’s Lectures on
Painting, given at the Royal Academy in London during the early years
of the nineteenth century, and published posthumously in 18 30.°’ Here
we have a great, original Romantic painter sharing with us his views on
his art. Naturally one opens this book with great expectations, and so,
one assumes, many readers must have done in the early nineteenth

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century. However, one’s expectation of an insider’s treatment of what

is specific to Romantic painting is bound to be disappointed. Fuseli
closely follows the patterns of Renaissance treatises on art; he discusses
the topics inherited from previous centuries, and he treats them in the
same order in which they had been treated in the late sixteenth century.
After invoking the authority of the ancients and particularly emphasiz-
ing the significance of Quintilian, he surveys the history of ancient and
“modern” art, rehearsing the Quarrel between the Ancients and the
Moderns. Painting itself is treated under the traditional headings of
invention, composition, and expression, chiaroscuro, design, and color,
the presentation reaching a conclusion in a treatment of the human
figure. Had art changed at all since the days of Lomazzo and the
Venetian writers on painting? Were we to judge by what Fuseli tells us
in his Lectures, we would hardly be able to guess the profound upheaval
of which his own work is such an eloquent illustration. Fuseli’s treatise
is representative of the rather rare attempts made by artists of the
Romantic era to provide an overall system of art. If we are looking for
the painters’ views on what was perceived as new and urgent, of what
really concerned them at this crucial stage, we shall have to renounce
the comfort of systematic presentations. It is the personal document,
sometimes confused, and often employing a private language and sym-
bolism, that holds the key to the intellectual world of the Romantic
painters.

2. RUNGE

Among the most important witnesses of the artists’ thought is the

German painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810). His Hinterlassene Schrif-
ten (Literary Remains) consist mainly of letters and personal notes, and
contain only a few fragments of a systematic doctrine of color. In the
simple sense, then, we do not have a “theory” by Runge, that is, a body
of thought presented in the form he would have wished us to read.
This fragmentary state of presentation should not mislead us, however.
Like some other artists of his time, Runge had a profound need for
reflection and intellectual understanding of art, and he strove to cast
his ideas and observations into a coherent pattern of thought.

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The desire for a systematic understanding of art was the Romantic

artist’s natural response to contemporary perceptions of historical crisis
and instability. Runge was aware of how questionable, perhaps even
hollow, were the models that academic wisdom was still holding up to
artists for imitation. Could classical art, presented by Winckelmann and
Mengs as the great model, actually perform the redemptive miracle that
some critics and teachers expected of it? “We are not Greeks any
more,” notes Runge, “we can no longer perceive the whole when we
see their perfect works of art. .. . (1,6).’* In earlier periods, the cultural
basis and the social context of art were taken for granted, but now
doubt has been cast on them. Both what art should do and how it
should try to do it were no longer a matter of course. What this state
of affairs seemed to require of the artist was, first of all, a serious effort
to firmly rebuild the intellectual basis of art and to understand its real
and proper context. The painter’s attempt to make out his aims as
clearly as possible and to realize what he could, or could not, achieve in
his art became a task that was perceived as urgent.
Let us begin with the broadest context. Runge did not consider art
as a domain, or a value, in its own right. For all his Romantic flirtation
with the “religion of art,” he firmly believed that the painting or the
piece of sculpture cannot sand alone; they must occupy their proper
place in a comprehensive world picture in order to fulfill their proper
function. In a note dating from 1802, he outlined, in ten points, what
he called “the requirements of art.” This outline brings Runge as close
to an encompassing system of thought as he ever attained. Both the
points themselves and their sequence are significant. Here is the role in
extenso:

1) Our presentiment of God;

2) the perception of ourselves in connection with the whole, and
arising from these two:
3) religion and art; that is, to express our highest emotions by words,
tones, or pictures; and here the visual arts in the first place search
for:
4) subject; then
5) composition,

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6) drawing,
7) coloristic character,
8) posture,
9) colors.
10) tone. (1,13—14)

These ten points, one sees, are composed of three groups: first the
intellectual foundations and contexts of art (1-3), then the subject
matter of the work of art (4), and finally the formal components of
which it consists (s—10). The intellectual, or philosophical, foundations
are essential not only for an understanding of the work of art but, first
of all, for its production. “In my opinion,” says Runge, “no work of art
can come into being if the artist did not start out from these first
moments” (1,14). Nor should the work of art, even a work of religious
art, be deemed to be an end in itself. “Religion is not art,” he warns,
perhaps even himself, “religion is the highest gift of God, art can only
express it more wonderfully and more intelligibly” (II,148).
The religion of which Runge speaks, however, is not necessarily what
established institutions would accept as such. To be sure, he intends the
God of whom he speaks to be the Christian God, and occasionally he
even quotes the Bible. But the basic feature of his religion is presenti-
ment, Ahnung, man’s vague, intuitive perception of the Divine. Ahnung is
a subjective experience, and Runge’s religion thus rests on a psycholog-
ical foundation. It is the subjective perception of the divine, the reli-
gious experience rather than the accepted ecclesiastical dogma that is
reflected in art. Moreover, every great work of art reflects our intuition
of the divine. “The most perfect work of art, whatever else it may be,
is the image of the most profound presentiment of God in the man who
produces it. That is, in every perfect work of art we sense our intimate
connection with the universe” (II, 124). Translated into modern speech,
this means, first, that a painting is “religious” when it expresses the
artist’s religious experience, and, second, that religious experience,
whatever that may mean specifically, reflects a feeling of relatedness to
the universe.
Runge takes yet another step. When consistently thought through,
this further notion was bound to have fateful consequences for art. In a

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letter to Pauline, his future wife, in which he tells her that he intends
to devote his life to art, he says however that art, too, “has value for
me only insofar as it gives me a clear notion of our great connection
with God” (II,174/75). In a letter to his mother, he writes that ‘‘where
art is not one with, and indivisible from, the inner religion of man,
there it must decline, be it in an individual person or in a whole
generation” (II,122). These statements strike us as strange. Are we
listening to a medieval monastic preacher who wishes to limit the
sphere and autonomy of art? But Runge goes even further. In a letter
to his brother Daniel, written on July 7, 1808, a letter that is an exalted
panegyric on the love of Christ, we read: “I wish it were not necessary
for me to pursue art, because we should go beyond art, and in eternity
one will not know it” (II,223). For my part, he adds in a personal note
that reminds the modern reader of Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘I would not
need art could I live outside the world, and as a hermit.” Art, then, is
devoid of any autonomy, it does not carry its value within itself. It is
only as a means to an end that Runge is ready to accept art.
From this point of departure, it is easy to reach the conclusion that
art is primarily a language. This, of course, was an idea common in
Romantic thought. What this language is to express are emotions.
Runge has mainly religious emotions and experiences in mind. As with
other Romantic writers, he considers religious art as not necessarily an
art representing themes from Scripture, or producing pictures for the
purposes of ecclesiastical institutions; religious art is an art that ex-
presses religious emotions. Runge considered the expression of emo-
tions a basic condition for the value of a work of art. As a young man,
he was afraid “to lose emotions.” One day, he shuddered, he might
draw a face without emotion, “without there being something else
besides eyes, mouth, and nose” (II,32). Emotions are particularly essen-
tial and complex in works of religious art. Religious emotions, in
Runge’s view, derive mainly from the artist’s experiencing of nature.
Nature is the great presence of God, and it is natural that it evokes in
man the powerful stirrings and awe that presence deserves. In conclu-
sion, there is no conflict between the religious nature and the subjective
origin of the work of art. Religious art, he says, is the “language of the
soul” (II,97).

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The specific topic that played a central role in Runge’s reflections on

painting is that of light and color. It occupied his mind for many years,
his views on it taking shape only gradually. In his reflections on light
and color, we can observe how the painter’s concern merges with the
symbolic doctrines of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Runge was
here particularly influenced by the German seventeenth-century mystic
Jakob Boehme, with whose work he became acquainted through his
friend the poet Ludwig Tieck.
Runge reads metaphors on light as what they are, namely, symbolic
expressions in need of interpretation; but he also reads them literally.
Thus light is the physical condition of brightness, but it is also the good,
darkness is the privation of light rays, but it is also evil. In reading
Runge, one constantly has to shift from a literal to a metaphorical sense,
and back again. To give but one example, in a letter to his father-in-
law, obviously written while the lamp on his desk was going out, he
wishes the daylight were already there: “It is only a makeshift, this
illumination by lights put up by men, till the light comes that shines in
eternity among the children of man’ (II,346). The oscillation between
the simple object (the lamp you turn on in the evening) and the spiritual
meaning (“the light that shines in eternity”) is typical of Runge’s
thought. Probably no other painter in the early nineteenth century so
clearly perceived the spiritual meaning of physical light.
Take, for instance, a statement such as the following: “Light, or
white, and darkness, or black, are not colors, the light is the good, and
the darkness is evil (I refer again to the [story of the] Creation), the
light we cannot grasp, the darkness we should not grasp” (1,17). The
historian, attempting to trace the origins of these ideas, is bewildered.
The notion that light and darkness, represented by white and black, are
not colors clearly derives from Renaissance workshop doctrine.”’ The
equation of light and darkness with good and evil, particularly with
reference to the biblical story of creation, belongs to an altogether
different realm of thought, of theological and symbolic thought as it
occurred in mystical movements. In Runge’s mind all these are lumped
together in a fashion that makes it hardly possible to separate the
trends.
He describes the contest between light and darkness in terms that

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remind us of an ancient mythical theogony, but here they are permeated

both by moralizing metaphors and by plain pictorial experience. “The
light, when it is ignited, first gives a very small glimmer, and darkness
pushes it back unto itself; it is no less true, nevertheless, that it is a fire
and a true light. Darkness cannot destroy light, but light is able to
scatter untruthfulness and falseness unto the four winds. The one spark
that heaven gave us can grow and thrive and become a great fire that
scares away predatory beasts, and ruins the enemy in the dwellings of
his own stupidity” (II,203).
Many of these metaphors seem overtly literary, and yet it may be
that his very fascination with light and color reveals a painter’s eye and
mind. Wackenroder, we remember, showed little interest in the works
and charms of light and color in art. To him, they were only “externals”
(Aussenwerke) of art, no more deserving of greater attention than other
“externals” deserve. So far as he noted coloristic effects at all, they
were effects of light and atmosphere in nature, such as a sunset, not in
painting. Runge, as we have seen, is in many respects quite close to
Wackenroder, but he differs from him completely in his attitude to
light and color.
For many years Runge made intense attempts to build up, and clearly
articulate, his doctrine of color. These efforts reached a peak when he
composed his Farbenkugel (1,112—128), preceded by a fragment on the
same subject written in 1806 (I,84-112). We shall not discuss the
development of his views on color, but shall instead treat them as if
they were of one cast.
Color, Runge claims, is the last part of art that still strikes us as
mystical, and it will forever remain so. That mystical nature follows
from the unique position of color in the order of things, and from the
function it has been assigned. Light itself, as we have seen, man cannot
grasp, and darkness he should not. Between these two poles lies color.
Runge compares color to the revelation of an invisible god. “Revelation
was given to man,” he says, “color came into the world” (1,17). By
color he means the three basic hues, blue, red, and yellow. Light is the
sun, at which we cannot gaze. But when the sun inclines “towards the
earth, or to man, the sky turns red. Blue keeps us in a certain awe, that
is the father, and red is the mediator between earth and heaven, when

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both disappear, then comes, in the night, the fire, this is the yellow and
the consoler, that is sent to us—the moon, too, is only yellow” (1,17).
Runge tried to work out a comprehensive and coherent color scale
that would also be a symbolic system. To this end he combined the
literary tradition common in German mysticism (particularly in Jakob
Boehme) of reading color as an indication of meaning with the painter’s
intimate familiarity with chromatic tones and shades and the emotional
effects they are supposed to have. Such attempts had been made
before.*° What is perhaps especially characteristic of Runge’s effort is
that not only does it attribute meanings to the individual hues; the very
order of the specific colors within the scheme is accounted for by the
structure of the symbolic system. In the history of color scales, such a
full merger of sensual qualities and symbolic characteristics is very rare
indeed.
Between white and black, that is, between light and darkness, there
are, as we know, only three basic hues—blue, red, and yellow. Each of
these has a distinct expressive character; in other words, it evokes a
distinct emotional effect in the spectator. At the same time, however,
each of these colors manifests a specific level, or aspect, of the “objec-
tive” structure of the divinity, a structure that does not depend on our
experiences. Blue, Runge declares, indicates God the Father. The histor-
ical conventions of the iconography of colors, to say the least, do not
unequivocally bear out our artist’s belief. Why, then, does he make blue
the color of God the Father if he cannot rely on what is generally
accepted in the history of painting? What seems to follow from Runge’s
thought suggests that the answer also does not result from theological
considerations. It is rather the expressive effect of blue that provides
the solution. “Blue keeps us in certain awe, that is the father” (1,17).
Because the emotional effect of blue is to create awe, and thus to
distance the spectator from what is represented, it is the color most
fitting that aspect of the divinity from which we are most removed. To
be sure, Runge does not explain his intention in simple, straightforward
words, but this seems the most likely interpretation.
Red, he goes on to say, “is normally the mediator between earth and
heaven.”” Now, placing red in the center of the color scale, between
white and black, has a long history. Italian sixteenth-century doctrines

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of color, composed by both painters and scientists, claim this position

for red.?! Runge, however, goes beyond the Renaissance doctrines: red
is not only in the middle between the ends of the color scale, it is the
active “mediator” between the two poles. Red may have derived this
role of active mediator from being the color of Christ. As Christ
mediates between man and God, so red, his color, mediates between
light and darkness. That red is the color of Christ is not only a piece of
conventional iconography; it was also explicitly asserted in Runge’s
circle, mainly by the poet Tieck.*?
What Runge has to say about yellow is surprising. It has always been
accepted that yellow, together with red and blue, belongs to the basic
colors. But views have differed widely as to what it means. Yellow was
the color of gold, but it was also the color of slander, of the prostitute
and the Jew. Runge grants yellow—the fire in the night, the compas-
sionate moon—a noble character, for it must be part of the chromatic
manifestation of the Trinity. Again it was Tieck who conceived of the
moon as the consoler, but Runge embodies this psychological interpre-
tation in the sphere of religious imagery. The moon, he says a little
later, “is the consoler, the Holy Spirit” (1,41).

3. FRIEDRICH

The great painter of German Romanticism, Casper David Friedrich

(1774-1840), is another important witness of how Romantic attitudes
were perceived by the artists of the time. His notes are fragmentary,
perhaps even more so than Runge’s, and they consist in part of his
friend’s records of the conversations he had with them. This state of
documentation does not, however, impair the clarity of this testimony
as to the concerns and beliefs of the Romantic artist.
Friedrich accepts the split between the inner and outer vision, the
being within man and the world outside him, as a matter of course.
This split, in fact, forms the basis of his reflections on art. The artist, he
believed, has an “innermost consciousness” (innerstes Bewusstsein). Like
Wackenroder and some other Romantics, he conceives of the artist’s
inward spiritual life as a token of the divine presence in man. “Follow
unconditionally the voice of your inner self,” Friedrich admonishes his

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fellows, or possibly himself, “because this is the divine in us, and it does
not lead us astray. Keep sacred every pure movement of your soul,
keep sacred any pious presentiment” (p. 83).°? The artist should follow
this inner call of his inner self because “the only true source of art is
our heart.”
Caspar David Friedrich, as one knows, was a landscape painter, and
we have already seen that he believed that landscape, that is, “nature,”
is the most worthy subject of painting.” * Nevertheless, he stresses time
and again that the work of art flows from the artist, not from the
nature depicted. By making “our heart” the only origin of the work of
art, Friedrich rejects, even if only implicitly, an age-old claim inherited
from the Renaissance: the claim that nature, the world surrounding us,
is full of forms and shapes, and that it is these shapes that stimulate the
creative process. Leone Battista Alberti opened his treatise on sculpture
with the bold statement that the artist, stimulated by the half-articulate
forms he encounters in the nature surrounding him, notices that, with
only slight changes, these shapes can be turned into artistic representa-
tions.*> In a sense, then, he makes nature herself a partner, if not the
major origin, in the creation of the work of art. This attitude changed
radically around 1800. For Friedrich the Romantic landscape painter,
nature is no longer “full of form.” To be sure, “every manifestation of
Nature, recorded with precision, with dignity, and with feeling can
become the subject matter of art.” But note: it is the subject matter,
not the origin of art. Moreover, even in such faithful and dignified
recording of nature, it is the artist’s emotion that counts and that
should be manifested. “It is not the faithful representation of air, water,
rocks, and trees that is the task of the painter,” Friedrich notes, “rather
his soul and his emotions should be reflected in it [the landscape
picture].”
A student in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot help
noticing how frequently Friedrich speaks of the “unconscious.” Clearly
our artist pictured the soul as consisting of layers, one placed on top of
the other. The upper layers thus cover, and hide, the lower ones. This
image of the soul surely has something to do with Carus’s psychology,
but it may also have been derived from other sources of Romantic
philosophy. Thus Schelling, in his lecture “On the relationship between

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the visual arts and nature,” speaks of an “unconscious force” (bewusstlose

Kraft) in the artist’s soul. In the artist’s conscious production, this force
acts together with his reflective thought and with his skill.°° Friedrich
makes the unconscious emotion the central motivating force in the
creative process. ‘‘A feeling, darkly intuiting, and rarely fully clear to
the artist himself, always underlies his pictures” (p. 89).
Friedrich extols the significance of the unconscious for the artist, of
the underlying stratum that is covered by the upper, conscious layers.
The unconscious emotions, he believes, are superior to analytical think-
ing and logical procedures. The unconscious is concerned with subjects
other than those that fill our conscious thought, and the former are
inherently superior to the latter. Addressing God or Nature, he ex-
claims: “You gave us comprehension and reason to investigate and grasp
things terrestrial, but to know things celestial you gave us a heart, and
put within us high presentiments.” at

III. POSITIVISM

1. TURNING TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Romantic views of what makes an artist and of how he operates posited

introspection as a major road to artistic creation. Both the literary men
and the painters had little use for the “outside” reality of the material
objects that surround us. While in their paintings the Romantic artists
may have taken careful account of material realities, they disregarded
them in their theories. The artist creates his work, they believed, by
focusing on his inner vision, and therefore making the images of the
objects around him into “raw material” to be shifted around and
transformed according to his expressive needs. Thus the landscape
became a field for the projection of emotions. Nature, as we have seen,
had become so spiritualized in Romantic thought that its material,
objective character was almost dissolved. Social and historical realities
also play a minor part in Romantic thought on art. When a social
reality is referred to (as in Wackenroder’s description of Diirer), it
becomes almost openly utopian, mythological. Is the depiction true and

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correct? The question does not arise. Perhaps nothing so well illustrates
the distance the theory of art has traveled since the Renaissance than
the Romantics’ lack of concern with objective and demonstrable truth.
In Renaissance culture, as it well known, an important task of art was
to present a “true” record of a given piece of the world. The theory of
art was supposed to provide the rules and procedures that would ensure
the correctness of the representation. On the face of it, Romantic
thought continued Renaissance ideas, and even employed Renaissance
terminology. Yet some of the fundamental assumptions with regard to
both the artist and the spectator had radically changed. The picture,
the statue, or the poem are now presumed to be revelation, either of
the divine spark in the artist’s soul or of his unique experiences. The
theory of art adjusted to these new conditions. The suggestive, evocative
description replaced the rationally argued reasoning.
Awareness of “outside,” material reality and recognition of its signif-
icance for the production and understanding of art came back in force
in nineteenth-century culture. Whether this return to an acknowledg-
ment of the realities of the ‘world’ and their relevance for art was
linked with the dominant trend of Positivism, or whether it derived
from other sources, it remains clear that in the mid-nineteenth century
reflection on art was not primarily concerned with some “inner” life of
the artist, with visions perceived in dreams, or with the experience of a
supernatural beauty. Instead, aesthetic thought turns to what, at the
time, were frequently called “facts.” It is an altogether different intel-
lectual climate that now sets in, and it is new approaches that come to
the fore. The problems themselves do not radically change.

2. TAINE

An important representative of the new trend is Hippolyte Taine (1828—

1893), a versatile and prolific author whose impact on the later nine-
teenth century was extensive. Characteristic of his aesthetic thought is
his exclusive concern with the arts. He leaves no room for, and he has
no interest in, beauty as such. “A full explanation of the fine arts,—
this is what one calls aesthetics,” he says in his opening remarks in the

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lectures on art (1,11) delivered in 1865 at the Paris Ecole des Beaux
Arts.*°
Taine divides the arts into two groups: one, called “the representa-
tional arts,” consists of painting, sculpture, and poetry; the other, “the
mathematical arts,” > is made up of architecture and music. He rejects,
then, the common linkage of painting and sculpture with architecture,
an axiom bequeathed by the Renaissance and repeated by every gener-
ation since. Our author’s main interest, however, is in painting and
sculpture. His criteria of judgment, it has been suggested, are in fact
inapplicable to any but the representational arts.*?
In the opening section of his lectures on art, Hippolyte Taine
proclaims that his “sole duty is to offer you facts, and to show you how
these facts are produced” (1,37). Now, one does not have to be a
philosopher to see that the notion of “fact” is very complex and
problematic. Taine himself could hardly make up his mind what pre-
cisely he was referring to in using this term. Sometimes it is the
concrete, individual painting that is considered a “fact,” sometimes
certain types of procedure are so termed. Be that as it may, the very
orientation toward facts marks the powerful reaction against the legacy
of Romanticism. It is a turning away from the enclosed domain of the
subjective, “inner” experience.
Taine was also opposed to any prescriptive, normative thought on
art. The modern character of his own thinking seemed to him to lie in
its being descriptive rather than prescriptive or dogmatic. He himself
thus characterizes his theory in his opening remarks: “Ours is modern,”
he says, “and differs from the ancient, inasmuch as it is historic, and
not dogmatic; that is to say, it imposes no precepts, but ascertains and
verifies laws” (1,36). He does not wish to give instructions to the
practicing artist, nor, for the benefit of the audience and its judgment,
does he want to derive “good art” from such supreme values as beauty.
His thought, he indicates, is opposed to metaphysical doctrines that
apply their ideas as “un article de code” to admonish and direct the
productions of works of art. He wants to attain knowledge that is
“purified” of any external —ethical, religious, or metaphysical—con-
sideration or coloring. It is value neutrality that seems to ensure truth.
The rejection of any prescriptive or normative orientation of art

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theory is linked to the scientistic attitude that looms large in Hippolyte

Taine’s background. In the middle of the nineteenth century, scientism,
the desire for systematic, precise, and verifiable knowledge, to be
achieved by total abstention from interference with what is being
studied, became an important cultural force, and helped to create an
intellectual climate that affected thought in many disciplines. Taine’s
generation, reaching maturity in the middle of the century, was inter-
ested neither in introspection nor in rhetoric; what it wished to know
was what could be learned by the observation of facts, not only in the
natural sciences but also in the study of morality, religion, and the arts.
The world of man was to be studied in the same way as the world of
nature.
Total adherence to the reality that can be observed discloses an
affinity to realism in art, and to imitation as the basic theoretical
assumption. Taine indeed believes that imitating reality is a natural urge
in man, and the basis of all expanding and flourishing art. Renouncing
reality and precise imitation is a hallmark of decay. “Every school (I
believe without exception) degenerates and falls, simply through its
neglect of exact imitation, and its abandonment of the living model”
(1,45).
But is exact imitation of reality the ultimate aim of art? If that were
the case, Taine says, photography could be expected to produce the
finest works of art. This observation must be one of the earliest
references to photography in an aesthetic discussion of “mimesis.”
Taine, in fact, is not oblivious to the value of photography. It “is
undoubtedly a useful auxiliary to painting, and is sometimes tastefully
applied by cultivated and intelligent men; but after all,” he adds, “no
one thinks of comparing it with painting” (1,51). Slavish imitation, such
as he deems photography to be, should be excluded from the realm of
art. How then, one asks, is art to be imitation? The answer is that the
artist should not imitate everything he sees. He should leave out some
parts of what he encounters and imitate only some—select — features.
“It is essential, then,” Taine says, “to closely imitate something in an
object; but not everything” (1,56). If you ignore this demand for selec-
tion, you make yourself guilty of an “excess of literal imitation” (1,54).
I shall not here discuss the philosophical implications of this advice

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to imitate nature selectively. Such an imitation assumes that art does

not follow from nature only, but also from that force that directs the
artist to imitate some and to disregard other features that he experi-
ences in reality. This belief, and the philosophical difficulties it implies,
are as old as art theory.*° Instead of dwelling on the philosophical
problem, I shall ask a practical question: What is it that the artist should
imitate?
Taine’s answer is explicit and articulate, though not necessarily clear.
What the artist should imitate, he claims, is “the relationship and
mutual dependence of parts” (1,56). Our author is of course aware that
this is an abstract definition, one that lends itself to different readings.
He therefore tries to specify and explain. The artist has to “reproduce”
the “relationships of magnitude,” that is, the proportions he finds in
nature. He is required to imitate the “relationships of position,” that is,
the form. “In short,” he addresses the artists who made up his audience,
“your object is to reproduce the aggregate of relationships by which
the parts are linked together, and nothing else; it is not the simple
corporeal appearance that you have to give, but the logic of the whole
body” (1,57).
In what sense, then, is the “logic of the body” a “fact”? Surely not
in the simple sense of the word. No one would claim that it is a tangible
object, or that it is plainly and directly present in empirical experience,
as are other material objects. It is actually in this context that Taine
places the metaphysical concept of “essences.” The concept of the
“essence,” it is well known, does not easily agree with the scientistic
outlook. In the intellectual climate prevailing in mid-nineteenth-century
France, essentia was considered the epitome of medieval metaphysics, of
philosophical beliefs going beyond the limits of empirical observation.
That Taine uses this concept does indeed indicate the debt he owes to
metaphysics, and particularly to Hegel.” Be that as it may, he claims
that the artist, “in modifying the relationships of parts, modifies them
understandingly, purposely, in such a way as to make apparent the
essential character of the object, and consequently its leading idea accord-
ing to his conception of it” (1,64). He is aware of the metaphysical
implications of what he has just pronounced. The “essential character,”
he explains, “tis what philosophers call the essence of things.” Our author

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does not want to retain this suspicious term; it is “technical” (1,64). But
he retains the idea expressed in it. It is the artist’s aim “to manifest a
predominant character, some salient principal quality, some important
point of view, some essential condition of being in the objects” (1,64—
65). In summarizing his argument, he comes back to this point, stressing
the metaphysical character of the artist’s function. “The end of a work
of art is to manifest some essential or salient character, consequently
some important idea, more clearly and more completely than is attain-
able from the real object” (1,76). What the artist records, it turns out,
is not nature’s appearance, but some deeper layer that is not available
to the observing eye. The work of art, it follows by implication,
amounts to a metaphysical statement.
What is it that enables the artist to make such a statement? To raise
this question is, of course, tantamount to asking what makes him an
artist. Taine fully accepts the traditional dictum, restated countless
times since the Renaissance, that “‘artists are born, not trained.” But he
tries to define a little more closely the nature of the gift with which the
artist is endowed at birth.
Taine’s analysis of what makes an artist may at first seem surprising.
That he does not place special emphasis on virtuosity, technical skill,
and manual dexterity might have been expected at a time when the
command of technique, easily acquired in established schools, was not
much of a rarity. But he also does not mention imagination, that is, the
faculty that conjures up, or produces in the mind almost at will, figures
and scenes, shapes and objects that are not present before our eyes.
Instead, he extols a condition he calls “original sensation.” This is a
quality the artist brings with him to the experience of physical reality.
“In confronting objects,” Taine says, “the artist must experience original
sensation” (1,73). The term “sensation” was not unknown in the philo-
sophical and aesthetic language of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. In its broad philosophical use, it is, in France, perhaps best
known from Condillac’s system of sensationalism. Condillac’s theory of
the origin of ideas, reducing the contents of the mind to transformed
sensations, was a powerful influence, though it left little room for
creativity, for the artist’s spontaneous production of images. *” The term
was also used in the language of aesthetic theory and of art criticism.

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“Sensation” here came to indicate the material nature portrayed in

painting,” or the effect the painting has on the beholder.** Yet what
Taine means by “sensation” corresponds to neither of these meanings.
What he wishes to describe by this term is the unique intensity and
character of the artist’s experiencing of nature, the way he perceives
any piece of outside reality. It is the faculty, granted to the artist, to
perceive with distinction and directness the abstract structure of things.
He “naturally seizes and distinguishes, with a sure and watchful tact,
relationships and shades” (1,74). Nor does the power of the artist’s
“sensation” stop at the surface of the things perceived. Taine endows
the artist with some kind of clairvoyance. Speaking of the particular
“sensation” that characterizes the artist, he says: ‘““Through this faculty
he penetrates to the very heart of things, and seems to be more
clearsighted than other men” (1,74). Moreover, the artist’s “sensation”
is not passive, waiting, like a piece of wax, to receive the imprint of the
object perceived. “This sensation, moreover, so keen and so personal, is
not inactive.” Now, what is that “not inactive” original sensation? ‘““We
may adorn it with beautiful names;” Taine says, “we may call it genius
or inspiration, which is right and proper; but if you wish to define it
precisely you must always verify therein the vivid spontaneous sensation
which groups together the train of accessory ideas, masters, fashions,
metamorphoses and employs them in order to become manifest” (1,75).
Today Taine’s name mainly evokes the composite notion of “race-
milieu-moment.” It was by these three factors that he tried to explain
the emergence and character of the great literary and artistic creations.
The formula has been severely criticized, and not much of it has
survived in modern thought. The term “milieu,” however, has pre-
served its usefulness, particularly as an indication of the new trend of
thought Taine represents. “Milieu,” as Wellek says, “is a catch-all for
,’

the external conditions of literature” and art.*° In using it, Taine refers
to everything that can, in one way or another, be brought into contact
with art. It includes the physical environment (soil, climate), political
and social conditions, and cultural and psychological forces. It has been
said correctly that Taine never properly analyzed the notion, and rarely
attempted to clarify what he specifically meant by it.
In stressing the significance of “milieu,” Taine’s chief intention is to

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show that it is not the individual artist who determines the character of
the work of art, but rather the broad cultural reality from which it
emerges. To be sure, sometimes it would seem to follow from Taine’s
text that he conceives of art as only a matter of personal emotion.
Discussing Michelangelo, he speaks of the artist as compulsively mim-
icking an inner sensation, and argues that he altered the ordinary
proportions of the human body under such internal pressure (I,60 ff).
However, the major “law” governing the production of the work of art
is formulated in an almost scholastic manner. “A work of art,” Taine
says, “is determined by an aggregate which is the general state of the
mind and the surrounding circumstances” (1,87). The “aggregates” may
be ill defined, they may often be confused. What the term undoubtedly
shows is that the great creative powers of art are here sought beyond
the artist’s psyche, beyond his imagination, and his unique personal
character.
To grasp Taine’s theory of art, one must properly appreciate the
significance of types in his thought. For all his apparent connections
with realism or naturalism, it was not the individual figure, the image
of the live person walking the streets, that held his attention. Almost
his entire interest, Wellek correctly says, “focuses on fictional charac-
ters.” For him the character is “the concrete universal,”’*® and this is
the “reality” he had in mind. The concept of “type” was not new in
aesthetic reflection, as one need hardly point out. In modern times it
was frequently employed in German philosophical literature, particu-
larly by August Wilhelm Schlegel and by Schelling. Hippolyte Taine
formulated the concept on several occasions, not least in his lectures on
art.
We have already seen that the artist’s task is “to make apparent the
essential character of the object” he portrays (64). This character is “a
quality from which all others, or at least most other qualities, are
derived according to definite affinities.” In actual reality, the essential
character “moulds real objects, but it does not mould them completely:
its action is restricted, impeded by the intervention of other causes; its
impression on objects bearing its stamp is not sufficiently strong to be
clearly visible” (1,70). The artist’s job, so Taine repeats an age-old idea,
is to complete what nature could not, to show in full clarity what in

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nature is partly obscured. In past ages this argument had been adduced
mainly in connection with beauty. The artist, so we have heard time
and again, should show the beauty that is inherent in nature but that
cannot appear with sufficient clarity in the natural bodies themselves.
The individual artist and his unique character and style play almost
no part in Taine’s thought. This is not only a personal orientation of
interests; it also jibes with his philosophical concept of man. He often
conceives of the human mind in terms of mechanistic analogies. “A
man’s particular genius is like a clock,” he could say; “It has its
mechanism, and among its parts a mainspring.” *” Instead of dealing
with individual artists, Taine is concerned with the character of some
of the major historical formers of artistic creations, such as the Greeks,
the Italians of the Renaissance period, and the Dutch between the
fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are the great examples of
collective creation, and, perhaps following Hegel, Taine declares that
each of them made a distinct and lasting contribution to human culture.
His comments on the individual formations are not of equal significance
with regard to the theories of art he represents, and helps to construct.
I shall remark briefly on what he says about the Greeks and, especially,
the Dutch painters.
The primary characteristic of the Greeks was their ability to conceive
comprehensive ideas and images. Note that Taine does not emphasize
the “beauty” of Greek art, but rather its comprehensive, or composi-
tional, character. Wholeness, or comprehensiveness, one could say, is a
component of the traditional concepts of beauty. Yet there is a differ-
ence between a stress on beauty as such (even if it implies wholeness)
and a singling out of the specific component, making it the primary
subject. The ability to conceive whole, encompassing ideas and images
is made at least partially explicable to Taine by the impact of the natural
environment. The Greek countryside has no colossal proportions, no
mountaintops lost in cloud, no features that go beyond human compre-
hension. This quality of the surrounding nature is also found in the
social and political institutions of ancient Greece. The aesthetic charac-
ter of Greek art is primarily a manifestation of that overall character.
You can observe it in all the major monuments. A Greek temple, to
give but one example, is “a marble monstrance enclosing a unique

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statue. At a hundred paces off from the sacred precincts you can seize
the direction and harmony of the principal lines. They are, moreover,
so simple that a single glance suffices to comprehend the whole”
(11,418).
A great many of Taine’s ideas on Greek art derive from older
traditions. Thus, the influence of the Greek landscape and climate on
the restrained and measured forms of Greek art is found in Winckelmann“*®
and his followers. But Taine’s emphasis on these older ideas had a
significant effect on later nineteenth-century thought on art.
While what Taine says about the Greeks indicates how much he still
owes to the classicist tradition of the eighteenth century, what he says
about Netherlandish painting shows how far removed in fact he is from
that tradition. Dutch painting, Taine believes, stands for the northern,
or “Germanic,” races in general. It is of a particular character, both in
its spiritual nature and in its style. What distinguishes it from the art of
the “‘classic races,” that is, the art of people on the shores of the
Mediterranean, is “‘a preference for substance over form, of actual verity
to beautiful externals”’ (II,220 ff.). This “instinct,” as our author puts it,
is also characteristic of the religion and literature of the Netherlands.
As opposed to the masters of the Italian Renaissance, the Dutch artists
“were incapable of simplifying nature”; they aimed at the fullness of
reality (II,223). Seventeenth-century Dutch painters exalted man, but
they did so “without raising him above his terrestrial condition.” What
they tried to do, in fact, was to “expand his appetite, his lusts, his
energy, and his gaiety” (II,224). The modern reader, following Taine’s
argument, cannot help noticing how little our basic characterizations of
Dutch versus Italian art have changed in the hundred and twenty years
that have passed since these lectures were delivered to young artists in
the Ecole des beaux arts.
Hippolyte Taine, however, is not content with simply formulating
the expressive character of Dutch painting. A central value of Flemish
and Dutch art “is the excellence and delicacy of its coloring.” What
was it that brought about this sensitivity to color? The answer leads us
back to the central thesis. The sensitivity to color follows from “the
education of the eye, which in Flanders and Holland is peculiar”
(11,225). But what precisely was it that educated the eye in Flanders and

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Holland? Once again we learn something about how nature molds man
and his tastes. “In the dry country [Taine obviously has Italy in mind]
the line predominates . . . the mountains cut sharp against the sky.” But
in the Netherlands the climate is different, and so the taste that
developed under its impact will prefer different values. “The low
horizon is without interest, and the contours of objects are softened,
blended and blurred by the imperceptible vapor with which the atmo-
sphere is always filled; that which predominates is the spot.” Such
natural conditions also shape the way we perceive things. “The object
emerges; it does not start suddenly out of its surroundings as if punched
out; you are struck by its modelling, that is to say by the differing
degrees of advancing luminousness and the diverse gradations of melting
color which transform its general tint . . .” (II,226).
Here again very little room is left for the individual artist. It is the
basic conditions of nature and the essential structures of society that
determine the subject matter and style of the work of art. One can very
well understand how a generation suspicious of Romantic introspection
and longing for some kind of tangible, objective foundation was so
charmed by what Taine had to say. It is obvious that this message,
imbued with the scientific ideals of the time, is open to serious criticism.
Succeeding generations and other trends have indeed raised questions
that the Taine school could not answer. For the historian of art theory,
however, it is not always the “truth” that counts; he is often more
drawn by the historical power of a view than by its inner coherence.
Seen in such a light, Hippolyte Taine is an important representative of
the turn of thought characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century.

IW PACETS OF REALISM

1. ORIGIN OF THE TERM

Can we take what Taine says about the visual arts as a genuine,
authoritative statement of the movement known as Realism? One hesi-
tates. Perhaps no other aesthetic concept is as multifaceted, and there-
fore as difficult to use, as is realism. In speaking of realism, one should

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recall, we are dealing with a general tendency, not a specific doctrine.

Realism, it hardly needs stressing, means different things in different
contexts. In mid-nineteenth-century France, “réalisme’” became the
subject of a lively intellectual, perhaps ideological, debate. Jules Fleury-
Husson, known by the pseudonym of Champfleury (to whom we shall
return shortly), collected some of his—rather journalistic— criticisms
of painting into a volume he called Le réalisme (1857). At the same time,
his friend, the little-known Edmond Duranty, published seven monthly
issues of a magazine called Réalisme (from November 1856 to May 1857).
These and similar publications did not open up a theoretical discussion
on matters of art; rather they gave a generic name to a debate that had
been going on for some time. Discussions of realism, whether or not
that term was employed, occupied a central place in French aesthetic
thought of the period.”
While this debate was going on with regard to literature, what was
happening to the dynamically developing theories of painting and sculp-
ture? Here, it seems, the outlines were even more obscured than in
literature, and this is particularly true for views concerning the artist’s
position. I shall try to present the main currents of thought that
dominated the mid-nineteenth century through a few examples. While
none of these amount to a systematic doctrine, taken together they may
indicate the range of views held at the time.

2. PROUDHON

Let me begin with the thinkers who represent the “audience,” that is,
the society to which the works of art are ultimately addressed. | shall
start with Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), philosopher and social-
ist, social reformer, politician, and utopian. He was not in the first place
an aesthetician or critic of art, his major intellectual efforts being
devoted to problems of social justice and reform. It was Proudhon who,
as early as 1840, conceived the formula, destined to become famous
throughout Europe, that “property is theft.” Although Proudhon was
mainly concerned with social matters, he formed close and lasting
connections with artists, and he considered artistic creation as a signifi-
cant problem in his views on man and society. He was a friend of

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Gustave Courbet, and a member of the group of writers and artists who
supported Courbet’s radical stance. At the very end of his life, after his
major works had appeared, Proudhon also published, in 1865, a book
called Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale (On the Principles of
Art and Its Social Function), a kind of summing up of ideas expressed
in the course of thirty years.” s
In matters of art and aesthetics, Proudhon was not one of the great
minds of the nineteenth century. In acquainting oneself with his art
criticism one does not experience the exhilaration of discovering a new
continent, as when reading Winckelmann; nor does one have, as with
Hegel, the sensation of looking down from a mountaintop at a vast
landscape whose structure suddenly becomes clear. What Proudhon’s
often rather trivial statements offer us, on the other hand, is a familiar
tone that is sometimes surprising. We are in our own world, and many
of his statements could have been made yesterday. In fact, it is precisely
because what Proudhon says is so close to what we are used to hearing
that his phrases sound so trivial. We should read, and devote some
attention to, Proudhon as the link between a past and our present, even
if his intellectual level cannot be compared with that of the great figures
just mentioned. Proudhon is remarkable not only because he has a
general affinity for certain problems and attitudes characteristic of our
own generation but because it is particularly the radical attitude, and
the ideological debates it provoked, that he anticipates.
Proudhon’s attitude to art may sometimes seem paradoxical. On the
one hand, he posits an aesthetic faculty in man, a faculty that is a
natural gift. Man cannot do without art any more than he can do
without science or technique, he says in his major theoretical work. Art
is also what distinguishes man from all the beasts.°' Man, in his very
nature, is an artist. He invented painting for the “pleasure of his eyes.”
It is for this reason that Proudhon so intimately links art with human
freedom. “Art is liberty itself,” he proclaims. °* While this idea is not a
new one (in a slightly different form it was formulated by Friedrich
Schiller at the end of the eighteenth century), it acquires a new
significance in Proudhon’s doctrine.
On the other hand, Proudhon devotes a great deal of attention to
the social character and significance of art. In fact, the social dimension

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of the work of art is so overwhelming that it almost completely

overshadows all its natural components. The concern with art’s social
impact is found at almost all stages of Proudhon’s intellectual develop-
ment, as Pierre Palix has shown (pp. 865 ff.). It also led him to far-
reaching conclusions with regard to the position of the artist.
Art has an educative function, he believes, and it has the power to
incite people. The Church understood this, and therefore such large
parts of art were actually in the service of religion and the Church.
Proudhon may be opposed to the Church in his political views, but he
acknowledges the ecclesiastical insight into the power of art, with
significant repercussions on his view of the artist.
Art, it follows from much of what he says, is too serious and weighty
a matter to be left to the artists alone (Palix, pp. 889). Precisely because
the painting or the statue has such a great power of incitement, it is
society as a whole, and not the individual, even if he is the artist, that
must determine the subjects and the uses of art. Proudhon, the political
radical, here clearly anticipates some of the ideas we have come to
know so well in our own generation. The student of history cannot
help being struck by what seems to be this completely sudden emer-
gence of the demand for a “committed art,” inspired and directed by
society (and whoever may be in a position to speak for society).
Proudhon stresses that the artist cannot help being “committed,” to
use the present-day term. To paint something without caring about
what one represents is not only morally detestable; in the final analysis,
it is simply impossible. The artist will always take up a position, he
cannot simply remain neutral, without color, as it were. It is for this
reason that Proudhon believes the artist to be the collaborator of the
social reformer.
The subject matter and style of the painting follow from art’s
function in social reform. Proudhon defends what he calls the “critical
school,” that is, the school of realistic painting, against the idealizing
trend that prevailed in nineteenth-century academic painting. As Proudhon
projects his ideas, the representative of the idealizing trend will ask:
‘What can art do with such as we who are a wretched, servile, ignoble,
uncouth, ugly mob?” Our author’s reply to this question implies his
whole view of art and of art’s position in the order of things. Art, he

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says, “can do something most interesting, the most glorious thing of

all.” Instead of saying what that “most glorious” thing is, he goes back
to the basic aim of art. “Its task is to improve us, help us and save us.”
From this aim there follows the character of the representation. “In
order to improve us it must first of all know us, and in order to know
us, it must see us as we are and not in some fantastic, reflected image
which is no longer us.” In realistic painting, “man will become his own
mirror, and he will learn how to contemplate his soul through studying
his true countenance.” »*
Proudhon’s statement, giving his reasons for advocating realism,
deserves careful attention and analysis. He accepts as a matter of course
most of the basic premises of traditional art theory, essentially seeing
art as an imitation of outside reality (or “nature,” as it was called in the
Renaissance). Bodily appearance reflects moral character: in studying
our physical countenance we contemplate our soul. All this, though
perhaps in some slightly modified formulation, would have been accept-
able to most artists and thinkers between the sixteenth and the nine-
teenth centuries. His reasons for holding views that require a realistic
representation of nature, however, differ from those that made thinkers
of former generations accept the same principles. For the Renaissance,
and for all who accepted its legacy, the truthful rendering of nature in
art—-vera imitazione, as it was called——was an autonomous value need-
ing no further foundation. For Proudhon, realistic representation is not
an autonomous value, it is not an end in itself; rather it is only a means
that makes it possible to achieve art’s ultimate aim. That aim, we
remember, is to improve man, even to save him. In order to achieve it,
we need the shock of seeing ourselves as we are—“‘wretched, servile,
ignoble, uncouth, ugly.” In the last analysis, then, realism is an unavoid-
able, initial step in the treatment of mankind. One understands how the
painter is the collaborator of the social reformer.
Another feature of Proudhon’s concept of realism should not be
overlooked, even if it is only implied. This is the associating of realism
with man alone. Proudhon never explicitly states that realistic represen-
tation cannot be applied to a landscape or a still life, but all the
examples he adduces clearly point to man. Thus he praises his friend
Courbet, who “‘has seriously tried to warn us, chasten us, and improve

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us through portraying us as we really are.” °* Had Proudhon never seen

one of Courbet’s landscapes? Given the date and their intimate relation-
ship, he surely had. But realism, it seems, belongs to the domain of
man. Another example, even more striking, is the reference to Dutch
and Flemish painting, specifying “their village fairs, their wedding
festivities, their gatherings, their household interiors, and even . . . their
taverns. ...”°° There can be little doubt that Proudhon saw some of
the dramatic Dutch skyscapes and peaceful pictures representing cows
in meadows. Such images, however close their rendering may be to
nature, do not seem to be linked to realism. Realism not only expresses
society; it has social scenes and types as its subject matter.
The social essence of art extends not only over subject matter and
form; it also dominates the relationship between the artist and his work.
Proudhon even raises the question, though only in passing, as to
whether the artist can do what he pleases with his work. Is the artist,
for instance, permitted to destroy his own work? No Romantic would
have been in doubt as to the reply, and some may even have glorified
such a deed. Not so Proudhon. The artist, he wrote as early as 1848, “‘is
not the owner [of the work of art he has created], he is [only its]
producer.” To make clear what he means, he projects the imaginary
situation of “Leonardo da Vinci burning down his painting of the Last
Supper, after he has produced it, [and doing so] for his own pleasure,
and in order to manifest his ownership. This Leonardo,” Proudhon
concludes, “would be a monster.” ©

3. CHAMPFLEURY

Champfleury —the pen name of Jules Frangois Félix Husson, dit Fleury
(1821-1889)—can claim, probably with more justification than any-
body else, to have coined the modern term. “realism.” A versatile and
very prolific writer, active in various fields, he looms large on the
horizon of every student who tries to follow the unfolding of modern
views on art. His significance follows less from the depth and delicacy
of his thought (in profundity of thought and in subtlety of perception
he cannot compare with some of his contemporaries, such as Hegel or
Beaudelaire) than from the fact that he was seen as a genuine and

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central spokesman of a powerful trend of aesthetic thought in the

modern world. His major domain was, of course, literature. He wrote
novels that were much read in his time, and he wrote critical and
theoretical discussions of a great range and variety. For decades, more-
over, he also devoted much attention to the visual arts, primarily
painting, without restricting himself to his own period. Though focusing
on contemporary art, he obviously believed that the great artistic
heritage of the past sheds light on the problems of the present.
Champfleury’s attitude to the ‘“‘art of the Louvre” is one of discrimi-
nation between different periods. Never accepting traditional art as a
whole, he not only distinguished the achievement of one artist from
another, but also clearly preferred certain schools, or local traditions,
over others. The reasons for such preferences are always the tendencies
dominating one school or another. Even his criticism, then, his judg-
ment of individual artists or paintings, is permeated by the search for
Weltanschauung.
In the Louvre, that is, in the great art of the past, Champfleury was
mainly drawn to two groups of artists or artistic traditions.*’ Early on,
mainly before 1848, he was attracted by artists who had some affinities
to the spirit of the Baroque, painters of drama and tension. Rembrandt
is a good example of this spirit. His dramatic power reflects the inner
tension through the placing of lights and shadows: the darkness of the
shadows is pierced by mysterious rays of light. Paolo Veronese, the
most lively of colorists, is another prominent instance. It is not surpris-
ing that Champfleury was also attracted by the modern disciple of these
artists, Eugéne Delacroix.
The other school of painting that particularly interested Champfleury
is of a very different expressive nature: it is the school of Dutch
seventeenth-century painting. Delighted and admiring, he stands before
the quiet scenes shown by Dutch painters—landscapes, still lifes, and
genre scenes. It is the realism, and perhaps also the serene quiet, that
speaks to Champfleury. Not only the Dutch but also French artists like
Le Nain and Chardin belong to this school in his thought. Again, the
criticism is based on theory. What Champfleury admires in all these
artists is the faithful depiction of a reality that has not been made to
look more beautiful than it really is.

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The close interrelation between theoretical world view and art criti-
cism is even more manifest in his treatment of the art of modern times,
that is, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Champfleury
reserves his most biting criticism for classicist painting. Why actually
does he so much dislike Neoclassicism? It seems that his main objection
is “falsity.” “The Greeks of David are not Greeks,” our author writes.°®
The Antiquity that neoclassical painters project onto their large canvases
is a false Antiquity. But the critical reader is not always certain in what
specific sense neoclassical Antiquity is taken to be false. Would, for
instance, greater archaeological fidelity make the image of the ancient
world less misleading? The answer is not always clear. More can be
learned from what Champfleury has to say about the living representa-
tive of academic Neoclassicism, J. A. D. Ingres (1780-1867), for whom
he reserves his harshest disapproval. Champfleury’s criticism of Ingres,
one need hardly specify, is not presented as a theoretical doctrine; it is
primarily a criticism of individual paintings. And yet, it does make some
general theoretical assumptions, even though these remain implicit. One
assumption is that good painting must be based on a direct, immediate
representation of reality. Champfleury criticizes Ingres’s manner for
“coldness,” for adopting the style of official academism. The coldness
of style, one cannot understand it otherwise, results from replacing
nature by a system of conventions and from following artificial manner-
istic models rather than living reality. Ingres executes specific details
precisely, and in a sophisticated manner, but it is the nature of these
details and their placement in the whole image of the world depicted
that Champfleury considers false. The learned composition of Ingres’s
Apotheosis of Homer is an example of “insincere mannerism.”’
The other assumption he makes, without stating it in so many words,
is that live reality should be rendered “as it is.” Champfleury, we should
remember, wrote this criticism in 1848, in a period of high social
tension, and it is not surprising that he makes the depiction of social
reality the center of his discussion. Ingres, he claims, is the typical
representative of bourgeois painting. His insincerity—a crucial compo-
nent of a bourgeois painter’s artistic personality—makes him cover
reality, in itself ugly and deformed, with a fine gray shadow.” Ingres
treats reality cosmetically. He makes his models leaner than they ac-

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tually are, he endows them with the grace they lack in reality. Ingres’s
fault and that of bourgeois painting in general, we could say, is a moral
one.
The criticism of classicist clichés, and even of bourgeois insincerity,
sounds romantic. It would probably have been supported by all Roman-
tic critics. But Champfleury is not a Romantic, his attitude to Roman-
ticism is critical indeed. His disapproval of romantic art is less easily
grasped than his rejection of neoclassic painting, but it is no less
important. He does not use the term “romantic,” he speaks of the école
fantaisiste, but the painters he treats as its representatives (Delacroix and
Géricault) show that he means what we now call Romantic painting.
What the artists of the école fantaisiste suffer from is an excess of
imagination. Once again, one wonders what precisely is meant by this
lively phrase. What he intends to say seems, at bottom, to be that
Romantic painters, submitting to the power of their imaginations, are
carried away from actual reality. Raphael’s Madonna is a belle farce. Of
an allegorical statue called Youth he asks: “Does a woman exist that
represents Youth? And then the young figure shown is totally naked. Is
this one real?” And getting sarcastic, he continues: “One should make a
gown for her; where is the gown?” Based on these and some other
passages, one would have to say that imagination in painting largely
pertains to the realm of subject matter. All allegories, personifications,
and pictorial metaphors are included in that excess of imagination.
What is the difference, then, between classicism and romanticism?
Champfleury does not seem to doubt the personal sincerity of the
Romantic artist. He follows his own imagination, while the classicist
artist accepts ready-made formulae. But both abandon reality.
Now, if we take away classicist idealization, on the one hand, and
the excessive imagination of the Romantics, on the other, what are we
left with? Champfleury does not hesitate: what remains is the faithful
representation of reality, or what is called realism. Champfleury was
indeed considered the trailblazer of Realism in literature and painting.
And yet he was aware of how vague that term is. He is suspicious of all
“isms,” whatever they may indicate, realism, however, raises particular
difficulties. It has always existed, and therefore it has naturally come to
mean a great many different things. “Could I enter the policy of a

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government in order to prescribe what critics have called realism, the

pen would immediately burn my fingers, and would compel me to
write: ‘the cult of reality is the first of cults’ ””—so he said, in 1861, in
the introduction to his Grandes figures d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Great Figures
of Yesterday and Today).°! Almost a decade earlier, he had written that
“realism is as old as the world, and there have always been realists, but
the critics, in constantly employing the term, make it obligatory for us
to make use of it.”© But it is precisely the universality of realism in the
art of all ages that makes it so difficult to define the concept. Once
more, we learn what Champfleury actually means from the examples he
discusses rather than from any theoretical definition he might offer.
These examples are taken mainly from contemporary artists. In a
generation distorted and twisted by both Romantic sentimentality and
neoclassical dryness, so Champfleury thought, some painters stand out
by their “sincerity.” Among these is Corot. Corot’s virtues, as our
author sees them, are primarily his sobriety and the want of “artistic
effects.” To put it paradoxically, Carot’s “sincerity” consists mainly in
what is not to be found in his work. It is, then, only by comparing him
with other contemporary painters that his characteristic qualities be-
come manifest. In the whole century discussed in the present book,
ever since Winckelmann, we seem to encounter the same elusive value
that is believed to be lacking in the artistic production of the near past:
Winckelmann called this almost utopian value “simplicity” °° ; Champ-
fleury’s term for it is “sobriety.” Though the two terms are not quite
identical (Winckelmann would have disliked the “baseness” of Cour-
bet’s figures, Champfleury writes), they have a great deal in common;
they both express the longing for a genuine vision of the objects to be
represented.
Characteristic also is Champfleury’s interest in another contemporary
painter, Frangois Bonvin (1817-1887), who to us is not one of the great
artists of the nineteenth century. What attracted Champfleury to him
was what he perceived to be the prosaic character of his art. In Bonvin’s
work, so our author believes, we perceive a social tone. He describes
Bonvin, “the son of a seamstress and a village policeman,” as “the
painter of the family.” °° The Chardinesque character of Bonvin’s work
is stressed, but this character has become more prosaic.

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 The Artist

Champfleury reserves his greatest praise for Courbet, “the painter of

the landscape of humanity,” °° whose great achievement is the ‘“‘rehabil-
itation of the modern.”°®’ He stresses Courbet’s revolutionary role, his
breaking with traditions. Nevertheless, he attempts to place Courbet in
a great pictorial tradition. In France, so Champfleury reports a friend’s
words, three painters stand out: they are Le Nain, Chardin, and Cour-
bet.®* This is a realistic tradition, but it is also a tradition that, in subject
matter and style of presentation, has a certain social connotation. Our
author also looks for other historical connections that would be a
natural context for Courbet. To be sure, Courbet did not know the
Spanish masters, but, “without knowing the admirable canvases of
Velasquez, he finds himself in agreement with the illustrious master.” ©”
All these historical relations, however, in no way detract from the main
feature in the characterization of Courbet: he is the painter who
“rehabilitated the modern world.”
Time and again, Champfleury lauds the artist who turns to his own
time. Nor was he alone in this praise. In his generation, the doctrine of
accepting one’s own time was frequently preached. The present-day
student reading these demands, often phrased with fiery enthusiasm,
naturally asks himself what they in fact meant, the concept of contem-
poraneity being obviously a complex one. Moreover, it is a matter of
common knowledge that nobody can escape his own age, however
much he may wish to do so. Artists, whoever they may be, are
inevitably condemned to be the children of their time, and to reflect or
express, in one way or another, the concerns and moods of their own
world. And yet, it has correctly been said that the mid-nineteenth
century call for artists to be “of their own time” was more than a mere
truism.’° The “present world” or “our own time,” as Champfleury
understood these terms, are not abstract concepts. ‘““Our own time”’ is
both a domain of specific subject matter and a quality, or character, of
artistic representation.
Courbet, we learn, enlarged the domain of the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century “bourgeois” masters (among them such artists as Le
Nain and Chardin). He did so, first and foremost, by representing
figures and scenes unknown to the earlier artists. In The Stonebreakers he
embraced modernity. Such figures do not appear in the works of the

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former masters; they are documents of the modern age. But introducing
new subject matter is not the only form modernity takes. Embracing
“our own time” is also, and perhaps in the first place, acceptance of the
central value informing and directing the artists’ efforts. For centuries,
the “realist” critics felt, artists were dominated in their work by the
search for beauty. It was in the course of this search that certain
idealizations became common, finally degenerating into “empty” aca-
demic formulae. Accepting one’s age also became the acceptance of
reality, even if lacking beauty, even if deformed, as worthy of represen-
tation. Interestingly enough, Champfleury’s defense of this kind of
modernity becomes historical. He is aware that many of the faces and
figures in Courbet’s Burial in Ornans deviate from any canon of beauty,
but asks rhetorically: “The physiognomies of the people of Ornan—are
they more frightening and more grotesque than those of Goya, of
Hogarth, and of Daumier?” 7! Champfleury, the author of a monumental
work on caricature (for which see below, pp. 380), selects his examples
from the history of caricature. But he here touches on a problem—the
role of the ugly in art—that became prominent in mid-nineteenth-
century art. As it does not easily fit into the discussion of an individual
critic, or even of a specific trend of thought, we shall deal with it
separately at the end of this chapter.” Here one should say, however,
that abandoning the search for beauty, and even accepting the ugly, is
to Champfleury one of the indications of modernity.
In conclusion, we now come back to the major theme of this chapter,
the nature of the artist and his role in aesthetic thought. With regard
to this particular subject, the anti-Romantic leanings of realism become
strikingly manifest. Romantic thought, we have seen earlier in this
chapter, conceived of the artist primarily as a unique individual, a figure
distinguished by the power of experience and vision; his work originates
in the image appearing in his mind, beyond anybody else’s reach, and it
reflects his personal character and passions. In the thought of realism
the emphasis shifted radically. Where Romantic thought focused on the
artist’s unique, personal experience, the thought of realism is concerned
with the reality that is perceived as an objective configuration, both
with regard to subject matter and forms. Romantics, to be sure, never
denied that artists have their roots in cultural traditions. As we have

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seen, Wackenroder even pictured Diirer as a kind of master craftsman

working in an imaginary medieval city and guild. But they always, even
in speaking of Diirer, assumed that the work of art originates in the
artist’s inner vision, and that the act of creation cannot be regulated by
rational “laws.” Seen against this background, the realists’ views of the
artist, and particularly Champfleury’s, are of a conspicuously different
character.
The first observation that strikes the student is that in realist thought
the “problem of the artist” plays a much more modest role than it does
in Romantic doctrines. For Romanticism, it was a central problem.
Among the writers grouped as the “realistic school,” the center of
thought is occupied by the: selection and interpretation of subject
matter. The artist as such receives very little attention. Insofar as he is
discussed at all, it is his role in society, the effect of his work on the
audience, that is the major concern. Champfleury would agree that
painting cannot be considered simply as instruction; if it tries to be
instruction (many of us would today use the term “propaganda”), it
will quickly lose its power. ”? And yet he suggests time and again that
art brings traits of reality to our attention, and that this is an important
function that the artist should never overlook. The outright rejection of
art for art’s sake is a characteristic feature of the realists’ intellectual
attitude. In 1885, at the very end of his life, Courbet remarked that it
had not been his thought to “arrive at the lazy goal of art for art’s
sake.”’* When Courbet wrote these words, the rejection of purely
aesthetic value had been a leading principle for a whole generation. To
Champfleury himself, Courbet had said, precisely thirty years earlier,
that his Burial in Ornans would be “the moral and physical history of my
studio.””
Not less significant than what Champfleury has to say about the
artist’s nature and social function are the very few comments he makes
about the production of a work of art. They strike us both by their
content and by a certain harshness of tone. As they are marginal
remarks, made in the course of discussing other subjects, some of their
abruptness may be accidental rather than intended. Still, they are clearly
revelatory of Champfleury’s basic attitude to the problem that has
fascinated so many thinkers—how a work of art comes into being.

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The first statement, or rather group of statements, amounts to

making realism tantamount to the negating of imagination. We have
seen that Champfleury rejects allegories and personifications for the
reason that they are inventions rather than depictions of a reality
objectively available to every spectator. To avoid a likely misunderstand-
ing, it should be pointed out that he does not condemn allegories and
personifications because they are routine formulae that condemn the
artist to a dryness of style. His only reason for discarding them is that
they are inventions. For the artist’s work, then, objective truth is
superior to poetic invention: this is a leading principle of realist art
theory, and Champfleury is its spokesman. The inventing of a new
reality, a reality that did not exist before the artist shaped his work,
precisely this was the cornerstone of Romantic art theory, as well as of
theories in many earlier centuries. The realists’ total rejection of imagi-
nation is indeed a revolutionary turn in the history of aesthetic thought.
Another of Champfleury’s statements may also seem strange to a
modern reader. It has to do with the actual production of a work of
art. Because our author was not a painter, and was on the whole
removed both from the Academy and from live workshop experience,
his comments on this subject refer rather to some general characteristics
of the process of creation. Though Champfleury devotes no separate
discussion to the creation of a work of art, he manages to indicate that
the process has no value of its own. “The powerful painter,” he writes,
“should be able to blot out and redo ten times in a row, and without
hesitation, his best painting, [and this] in order to prove that he is
neither the slave of chance nor of his nerves.””° Champfleury does not
tell us why this should be so. His statement, however, stands in clear
opposition to the spirit of all earlier treatments of the subject. Ever
since the Renaissance, art theory, in a more or less explicit way,
conceived the creation of a work of art as a unique event. Even when
in actual fact painters repeated their compositions, theoreticians did not
seem to take notice of the fact. In Romantic thought, the uniqueness,
the inability to repeat the process, became part of the artist’s mystique.
It is part of the drive to see the artist in a new light, to plant him in a
new context, that he is supposed to be able to repeat the process ‘‘ten
times in a row.” The artist’s dependence on his “nerves’’—seven-

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teenth-century authors or the Romantics would here use the word

“inspiration”
—is a failure rather than a sign of grace.

4. FROMENTIN
In France of the 1850s and 1860s, as we have had occasion to see,
realism was not a well-formulated doctrine; rather it was a concern
with certain problems, an interest in a group of themes, figures, and
ways of depiction. In other words, it was an attitude or a mood rather
than a rational system. This state of affairs often makes it difficult to
say with any certainty that a given artist or writer does, or does not,
belong to what is called the realistic school. Does Eugéne Fromentin
belong to that school? Although it may be difficult to give an unequi-
vocal answer, he represents, better than any other theoretician, a certain
facet of the thought of his time, and he is at least closely related to the
realistic trend.
Eugene Fromentin (1820-1876) was indeed an unusual figure. In
Meyer Schapiro’s words, he was that rare man, “an accomplished artist
who was also a first rate writer” (Diderot Studies 5, pp. sff.). His place in
French letters of the nineteenth century is well established by his
famous novel Dominique and by his much-read travel book, A Summer in
the Sahara. But for decades he was also active, and well known, as a
successful professional painter. It was not surprising, therefore, that in
1862 the editor of an influential periodical, the Revue des deux mondes, in
which Dominique had appeared in installments, suggested to Fromentin
that he make a further contribution to the journal in the field of art
criticism. Another thirteen years passed before Fromentin responded to
this suggestion. In July of 1875 he visited the museums and churches of
Belgium and Holland, and though his journey lasted no more than three
weeks, it resulted in a long series of articles, eventually collected in an
imposing volume, Les maftres d’autrefois (1876), which was quickly trans-
lated into English as The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland (1882).77
Although Fromentin’s Maftres d’autrefois appeared only in the mid-1870s,
its roots, both intellectually and emotionally, are to be found in the
early 1860s of the nineteenth century. It belongs, then, to the time in

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which the different facets of the realistic attitude were being crystal-
lized.
A brief observation on the character of this unique text, The Old
Masters of Belgium and Holland, may here be in order. In a short preface,
Fromentin himself tells the reader what he is to expect. “The book,”
he says, “should be like a sort of talk about painting, where the painters
would recognize their habits, where men of the world would learn to
better know painters and painting” (xliii). His text does not indeed
pertain to any of the established genres of art theory. Reading The Old
Masters, one is reminded, as Meyer Schapiro has observed, of “the salon
review, the travel book, the critical essay and the private journal.” It is
not, nor does it claim to be, a scientific or philosophical text. The
paintings discussed are not grouped according to any intrinsic principle,
rather they are dealt with according to the order in which Fromentin
saw them while following his itinerary. His comments are written under
the immediate impression of the works of art he was looking at, and he
does not hesitate to openly express his emotional reactions to what he
sees. In all these respects, Fromentin’s text does resemble a salon
review, though the paintings themselves are part of the great heritage
of the past. It should perhaps be noted that this kind of writing on
great historical art was not altogether isolated in his day. Twenty years
before Fromentin, another well-known author, Jacob Burckhardt, trav-
eled in Italy, noting his lively impressions on works of art in the order
he saw them. These efforts formed Burckhardt’s Cicerone, published in
1ieshh5(5.
Fromentin’s choice of subject matter is of particular significance in
our context. The whole work treats the art of the Lowlands. The core
of the discussion is devoted to Rubens (pp. 18-107) and the Dutch
masters of the seventeenth century (Part II), especially Rembrandt (pp.
218-313). The last, rather brief section deals with early Flemish art, or,
as the author says, “Van Eyck and Memling” (pp. 317-339). In nine-
teenth-century France, as we have seen, a concern with the art of the
Netherlands was characteristic of the taste and mood in which realism
flowered. Fromentin clearly regards his investigations of the Lowland
masters as a means of educating contemporary artists and of directing
them in their work. In other words, he adopts the traditional aim of art

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theory. Our author knows the educational value of a model. Schools,

he says, still teach students how to write French prose by making them
study such masters as Pascal, La Bruyére, and Bossuet (xliv). Should not
the same principle be applied to painters? By analyzing the masters of
Belgium and Holland, Fromentin hoped to lead contemporary painting
in a specific direction, and to save it from aberrations and weaknesses.
The study of Dutch painting had, in fact, already exerted its beneficial
influence on modern art. Dutch landscape painting served as a model
for early nineteenth-century French painters. “This time Holland found
the right hearers; it taught us to see, to feel, to paint” (206-207).
What, we must now ask, justifies our inclusion of Fromentin in the
broad context of realism? Because realism was not a well-defined
doctrine, but rather a broad attitude, one artist’s or writer’s links to
this trend could differ widely from that of others. Several components
in Fromentin’s intellectual makeup show his affinity to realism. To
begin with, his desire for truthfulness to reality, the intense wish to be
“close to life,” ” while it cannot be considered a mark distinctive of
realism, should be noted in the present context. To be successful as a
painter of North African scenes, so he had already felt early in his life,
he had to go to Africa and to observe, from close by, life among the
Arabs. He was not content with the half-romantic imagery of Oriental
life, as it was known in Parisian letters and paintings. He wanted to see
the people in their natural environment, to observe their costumes,
settings, and habits of life. The desire to directly observe one’s subject,
to say it once again, is not in itself a sign that one is what we would
call a “realist,” but it does show discontent with the other great trends
of the time (Neoclassicism and Romanticism), and it discloses an atti-
tude that is very close to that of realism.
More important, though less tangible in our present context, is a
specific feature in Fromentin’s mental makeup, namely, his preoccupa-
tion with permanence. It has been said that the concern with the
permanent may also be discerned in his literary work: he loved the
solid, unchangeable nature of the desert.’* In his treatment of painting,
we discern a similar attitude: he is interested in the stable essence of
things rather than in their activity in life. In the great pictorial tradition,
so Fromentin believes, the emphasis was always on man’s stable nature.

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The decline of painting began, he argues, when the focus of attention

shifted to the story and the anecdote. At least implicitly, then, Fromen-
tin condemns history painting. The concentration on the stable, the
unchanging, the permanent leads to a direction of thought that was
close to realism.
His attraction to stability is linked with his views on reality, at least
insofar as that reality is the subject of artistic representation. Once
again we have to stress that Fromentin’s views are not clearly and
systematically presented—he is no philosopher, as we have said; yet in
reading his lively prose we can gain a notion of what he believed reality
to be. The outside world, Fromentin believed, is full of different
appearances, it displays an inexhaustible diversity of shapes. Behind that
bewildering variety, however, there are simple forms. In the multitude
of various shapes it is actually these simple forms that are countlessly
repeated, in ever-changing combinations. The world, he says in an
interesting metaphor, is a dictionary full of synonyms.” The original
idioms, so we understand, are stable and unchanging. In Fromentin’s
view there is, then, a kind of a simplistic Platonism. it is not very
fruitful to ask how he derived these views. Various versions of Platon-
ism were, of course, available to him wherever he turned, and that
there is indeed a Platonic influence at work in Fromentin we can
perhaps see from formulations such as “Les idées sont simples, les
formes multiples,” a phrase he uses in speaking of reality as a dictionary.
What precisely these elementary forms are in Fromentin’s thought it
would be difficult to say. Their function however, that of being a stable
foundation for a bewilderingly changing world of appearances, is ob-
vious.
His thoughts about the artist’s task are linked with his beliefs about
the nature of reality. To be sure, he speaks about the artist and his
work in many ways. Thus he writes with great freshness about the
different painters’ use of color and of their brush strokes, and savors
the marvelous texture of the canvas’s surface; he perceives the mood of
an artist, and his harmony with the nature that produced him (‘Of all
the Dutch painters, Ruysdael is the one who most nobly resembles his
country”—p. 183) But he also asks how the artist relates to the reality,
as he understands that concept. Now, Fromentin altogether rejects the

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Romantic vision of the artist as an original creator. The painter, he

believes, does not invent shapes, he does not produce something that is
radically new. His distinctive characteristic is his ability to penetrate the
surface of life, to discover the primary forms, and to present them to
the spectator’s eye. The artist thus shows us the inner structure of the
world.

Vv. THE-GREAT MAS TERS

1. INTRODUCTION

The student surveying French art theory around the middle of the
nineteenth century sometimes has the feeling, so he imagines, that the
surveyor drawing a map of a vast plain must experience: he finds
directions for orientation, he notices broad streams and surfaces, but
few are the features that forcefully arrest his gaze by their individual,
unique shape. In the imagined landscape of mid-nineteenth-century
French art literature, there is, however, one mountain range. Seen from
afar, it dominates the surveyor’s field of vision. That mountain range is
the work and thought of Delacroix and Baudelaire.
There are obvious difficulties in dealing, in the present context, with
their theoretical legacy. Both were great and original artists, and possi-
bly for this reason they are difficult to classify, to file under accepted
labels. Can they be seen as representing their time? One hesitates to
give a simple affirmative answer. In many respects they do indeed
reveal, more sharply than most other thinkers, some of the central
problems of their day. But they also keep alive, while transforming it, a
great deal of the heritage of the past. Both carry on with some
components of the Romantic vision. In this regard, their ideas are
linked with strata of the past. At the same time, however, both
Delacroix and Baudelaire are widely accepted and recognized as the
pioneers and trailblazers of modernity.
Though they are here grouped together, it would be a mistake to
overemphasize the agreement between them. Delacroix and Baudelaire,
even if we consider only their views on painting, were not one person-

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ality with two faces, as it were. It is true that the work and art thought
of the two overlapped and intersected. Baudelaire, as one knows, wrote
extensively on Delacroix, and we shall shortly come back to some of
these texts. Delacroix was profoundly influenced by Baudelaire’s views
and criticism. But in spite of these strong interactions there were also
tensions between their ideas. These tensions derive in part from their
thought being rooted in different arts, painting and poetry, and in part
from certain differences in how they looked at the problems they
approached. While they cannot be isolated from each other, they should
nevertheless be analyzed separately.

2. DELACROIX

The Character of Delacroix’s Writings. Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), one

need hardly say, is one of the best-known of nineteenth-century paint-
ers. He was also—and this, too, is well known—one of the most
articulate and literary-minded of artists. Delacroix’s need for conceptual
articulation is reflected in the considerable volume of writing, mostly
devoted to painting, that is his literary legacy. None of this writing ever
achieved a final and systematic form. It remained scattered in letters
and journals, written under special conditions, and not composed in
well-balanced form. Yet these notes, though fragmentary, are sometimes
quite extensive, and they often enable the student to reconstruct the
artist’s views in some detail. Delacroix himself was painfully aware of
the fragmentary nature of his notes. In 1857, he recorded in his diary
his intention to transform them into a Dictionnaire des beaux-arts.°° The
Dictionnaire, one should remember, was at the time an accepted form
for a highly systematic presentation of views on art. Viollet-le-Duc,
for instance, published his dictionnaires in those very same years.*!
Delacroix’s intention was never realized, and his literary work remained
incomplete. But his desire is in itself important testimony to how he
saw the theory of art.
In discussing Delacroix’s theory of art, one cannot forget that the
author was one of the most distinct and original painters of the century.
In his writings one indeed often perceives his intimate feeling for, and
first-hand acquaintance with, the craft of painting as well as his famil-

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iarity with the creative process. It is precisely because of this awareness

of Delacroix’s own work that one is often forced to note an incongruity
—at times obvious, at times only adumbrated—between his artistic
and his theoretical production. | should therefore like to emphasize
once again that we are here studying Delacroix’s theory, not his
painting. While we shall have to disregard the latter, it is important to
observe that the incongruity itself is significant evidence of the fact that
an artist’s theory is not necessarily a mirror image of his pictorial opus.
The theory of art is an intellectual pursuit with its own merits and its
own character.
Delacroix’s reflections on art may be fragmentary, but they are so
extensive and varied that we feel we are entitled to speak of a more or
less complete doctrine. It is possible, therefore, to ask what the pivotal
theme of this doctrine was. In other words, what was the problem
around which Delacroix’s teaching revolved? Here, it seems, the answer
is easily given. The subject that fascinated Delacroix and dominated his
reflections on art was the creative process itself. Time and again he tries
to unriddle the mystery of how a work of art comes into being, and
what properties the artist must possess in order to be able to shape his
work. His efforts to understand the essence of artistic imagination are
set in this context. Before turning to a discussion of this central subject,
however, it may be useful to briefly survey at least one other theme,
though it remained marginal in the artist’s thought. What | have in
mind is the question of the ultimate goal of painting.
Although Delacroix did not treat this subject systematically, we are
in no doubt of his major emphases. He saw a painting as a vehicle for
communication between souls, the soul of the artist and the soul of the
spectator. Among the notes made in preparation for the projected
Dictionnaire, we read the entry written on January 25, 1867: “The major
source of interest [in the work of art] comes from the soul [of the
artist], and it goes in an irresistible manner into the soul of the
spectator.” The work of art serves as a bridge between the soul of the
artist and that of the spectator. *” The affinity of this view to a trend of
Romantic thought does not have to be shown in detail. And yet we
should note that the emphasis on reaching the spectator radically differs
from a view, also found in Romanticism, that perceives the work of art

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as a self-expression of the artist, conceived and produced in isolation

from any audience. In Delacroix, it comes quite close to a rhetorical
concept of art. The affective, emotional impact of the painting is its
ultimate goal. The locus of the work of art, both in its production and
its effect, is the soul. (In passing, one cannot help noticing that in this
scheme of things, little room is left for the texture of the canvas or the
marvels of the brush stroke. There is an obvious and wide difference
between the character of Delacroix’s art and the nature of his thought).

The Aim of Painting. That the central aim of a painting or statute is to

move the beholder’s soul, it need hardly be said, is not a new idea. The
student who has followed the unfolding of art theory has seen various
and repeated proclamations that the picture’s or the statue’s expressive
effect on the spectator is the artist’s ultimate goal, and art’s ultimate
justification. From Plato, who saw an inherent danger in the power to
move the spectator, to the Counter-reformation, which saw in that
power a gift of God, to be used for the right and proper purpose,
almost everyone agreed that moving the spectator’s mind and soul is
what art attempts to do. Delacroix inherited his description of the goal
of art from tradition, and there can be little doubt that he was aware of
this, and saw himself as a link in a great historical chain.
While Delacroix followed tradition as regards the aim of painting, he
seems to have diverged from its core in his views on how this goal is to
be reached, that is, what means the artist employs and what methods
he adopts in order to move the spectator. Let us recall, in broadest
outline, how, between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, artists
and writers who preached the gospel of the affective value of the work
of art thought that this value could be realized. All these generations
believed that history has bequeathed to the artist a vast store-house of
configurations— scenes, compositions, gestures, colors, and so forth—
that are proven means of conveying experiences and evoking emotions
in the beholder. To be sure, this belief was stated in a variety of ways,
with a wealth of shades and nuances. The different artists and authors
of course believed that the creative artist’s personal experience might
add to, or intensify, the expressive power of the inherited motifs.
Essentially, however, they were all committed to the assumption that

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 The Artist

the beholder is successfully stirred by means derived from this great

tradition. Delacroix emphasizes other components. In his writings he
never explicitly negates the expressive significance of the inherited
pictorial language (in his actual work as an artist, he made extensive use
of it, as we all know). However, he gives very little attention to
rhetorical formulae in his theoretical reflections. Instead of the language
of culture and tradition, he proposes another feature as the mainspring
of creative power.

Imagination. One particular faculty distinguishes the artist: it is the

faculty of imagination. In 1857, Delacroix notes in his journal: ‘‘Imagi-
nation. It is the primary faculty of the artist.”°*This is only one of many
passages in which he stresses imagination. His friends saw Delacroix
himself as the artist who was dominated by imagination. Baudelaire, in
his famous essay “The Life and Work of Eugéne Delacroix,” describes
imagination as the essence of our artist’s work. “All the faculties of the
human soul must be subordinated to the imagination.” ** The full
subordination of all the faculties to the imagination is just what Dela-
croix was believed to have achieved, and this is what he himself thought
leads to moving the spectator’s soul. Imagination, then, as I have said,
is the central theme of his thought on art.
Both in his personal notes and in his published writings Delacroix
sang the praises of the artist’s imagination. But it did not take him long
to encounter the basic dilemma that all earlier praise of the artistic
imagination had faced. Does the artist’s imagination invent the image
he produces out of a complete void? In other words, is the production
of a work of art a “‘creation out of nothing,” a creatio ex nihilo, to use the
medieval term? Or does artistic imagination rather consist primarily of
a certain freedom to shift and arrange the images that in themselves are
not the artist’s invention, but are drawn from “nature,” that is, from
our experience of the “outside” world? Such would be the more
philosophical formulation of the unavoidable question. In art theory the
question cannot remain purely philosophical or only a matter of princi-
ple; it has obvious implications for both the art critic and the practicing
artist. The critic will ask whether originality (be it newness, inventive-
ness, or whatever else this problematic term may designate) is the major

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value in an artist’s work, and whether it should be ranked superior to

his other achievements, such as keeping tradition alive. The language of
criticism in our own day, as is well known, clearly shows how tenacious
such questions still are. But the implications for the practicing artist are
perhaps of greater importance. Should the painter give his fantasy free
rein so that he can conjure up on his canvas whatever strikes his fancy,
or should he rather limit his imagination by obeying a call for natural
similitude and by adhering to rational rules?
In the middle of the nineteenth century, two significant intellectual
forces combined against the view, or demand, that the artist give free
rein to his imagination. One of these was the great French tradition of
believing in “reason” and in the academic rules derived from it; the
other was the influential thinking of a dynamically growing “realism,”
then at its most vigorous stage. Delacroix, as we shall immediately see,
accepted the domination of “rules” and tried to make it part of his own
doctrine. The claims and assumptions of “realism” he rejected out of
hand. Reading his notes, particularly those written in the 1850s, it is
not hard to feel that he saw the realistic attitude as an immediate
danger. In his disputes with realism, Delacroix’s formulations often get
more pointed, and probably more extreme, than he himself would have
wished them to be. The theory of realism, we remember, refused to
grant the imagination any significant function in the creative process.
Nature herself, so that theory held, provides the forms and motifs the
artist needs. In representing reality, the artist in fact has to take care
that his imagination does not interfere with the proper and truthful
perception of the objects he depicts. It is mainly against this attitude
that Delacroix argues. In the artist’s work, he claims, the functioning
and moving of the imagination never stop. When looking at nature, the
artist cannot do away with his imagination. On the contrary: “In the
presence of nature herself,” so he notes on September 1, 1859, “‘it is
our imagination that makes the picture.” *° And as if to strengthen his
apology for the artist’s imagination, he compares painting with photog-
raphy. A painting and a photographic shot of the same site, he says in
the note just quoted, are not the same thing. “When a photographer
takes a view, all you ever see is a part cut off from a whole: the edge of
the picture is as interesting as the center; all you can do is to suppose

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 The Artist

an ensemble, of which you see only a portion, apparently chosen by

chance.” It is worth our while to recall that Delacroix was interested in
photography and that he did not reject the new medium. Already five
years earlier, he had described photography as a “tangibie demonstra-
tion of the true design in nature.”°° It is also well known that he saw
in photographic pictures a welcome substitute for the natural model.
But both the photograph and the live model are the artist’s point of
departure, they are never his product. This may also explain the
difference he suggests in the sentence just quoted. In the photograph,
everything — objects and shapes, order and composition—is furnished
by nature; the edges are just as significant as the center. In the painting,
shaped by imagination even if the painter was looking at nature while
working, the hierarchy of significance, the distinction between the
center and the margins, is the artist’s product.
With all of Delacroix’s defense of the artist’s imagination, he is not a
radical “‘fantaisiste.” To produce a work of art, he believes, the imagi-
nation cannot be divorced from careful observation of nature, and it
cannot do without—and surely cannot replace—a system of rules.
Imagination in itself, taken as something self-sufficient, is not his goal.
It is even a danger. Unbridled imagination, such as he believed to have
recognized in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, is extraordinaire because it
is extra~humaine.®’ The poet’s excessive flights of fancy should be tem-
pered, and the same requirement holds good for the visual arts. Dela-
croix admired Rubens, but in that master’s paintings he sometimes finds
too much imagination.
Delacroix’s theoretical position on the question of imagination can
best be described as restrained, or, as George Mras puts it, ““conserva-
tive” or “moderate.”*® This position implies important conclusions.
Though he saw in imagination the artist’s central faculty, Delacroix
never believed that the creative process, the process in which the
imagination materializes into a work of art, in any way resembles a
creatio ex nihilo. Artistic imagination consists in the ordering and combin-
ing of features and forms, but the forms themselves—the “raw mate-
rial,” as it were, that serves the artist’s imagination—are not produced
by the fantasy; they are drawn from nature, from our experience, and
even from our cultural heritage. That the artist take his subject matter

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 Modern Theories of Art

from nature or from literature seems to Delacroix as natural as it

seemed to a Renaissance artist.
What Delacroix had to say about the role of the imagination does
not consist primarily in an analysis of the conceptual terms used in
treating the subject. His originality emerges most clearly in dealing with
a seemingly practical device, which, however, also involves a general
problem characteristic of the modern age. This theme involves both the
spectator’s imagination and the sketch as an art form. Nowhere does
Delacroix seem to have dealt with this question in a systematic fashion,
and yet one feels confident in reconstructing his views. We can ap-
proach the subject from two ends, that of imagination and that of the
sketch.

The Sketch. Imagination, I have frequently had to repeat in the course of

this volume, is one of the oldest and most central themes of reflection
on art. No wonder, then, that the notion underwent many shifts and
changes, and that we encounter it in a bewildering variety of guises.
One thing seems to have remained stable throughout: in discussing
imagination, one always had the artist’s imagination in mind. It was only
in the modern age that the beholder’s imagination began to receive
more consideration, and that it was seen as part of the aesthetic
problem. The spectator looking at a picture, so it was felt, was not
altogether passive, and he cannot be compared to molten wax onto
which a seal is impressed. On the contrary, the spectator is an active
partner, as it were, in bringing about that unique encounter between
man and work in which the picture or the statue acquires full life. Once
the beholder was perceived in this new role, it was natural that the
workings of his mind should arouse curiosity. How does the spectator
exercise his imagination in the process of experiencing a painting, and
how can the painter stimulate and direct the spectator’s imagination?
To judge from various scattered remarks, Delacroix must have been
concerned with these questions over a long period.
Already in 1853, Delacroix wondered, as we learn from a note he
made in his Journal on May 9, about the strange effect disproportion can
have on the beholder. Four years later, he obviously still considered the

354
 The Artist

subject important enough to reread what he had written and to amplify

his former ideas.

I said that the sketch of a picture of a monument—and the same is true of

a ruin or, in a word, any work of the imagination in which parts are lacking
—ought to react on the soul in just the proportion that we have to add to
the work, while it is producing its impression on us. | add that perfect works,
like those of a Racine or a Mozart, do not, at the first moment, produce as
much effect as those of less correct or even careless geniuses, who give you
salient parts standing out in all the stronger relief because others, beside them,
are vague or completely bad.*?

From Delacroix’s formulation one could get the mistaken impression

that he was discovering the power of the sketch. In fact, the pictorial
sketch was not a new subject; Delacroix was here taking up a common
theme, one that had given rise to a continuing and heated controversy.
But he was taking it up from an angle that was unusual for his time.
To understand the significance and special character of Delacroix’s
position, we shall have to devote a few observations to its broad
background. The sketch, needless to say, had been known for a very
long time; it was also a formal part of academic aesthetics. Yet in spite,
or perhaps because, of its age and wide diffusion, it carried a variety of
meanings, and it was associated with a multitude of forms. To speak of
a “sketch,” therefore, was far from self-evident in meaning; nor were
the reasons for appreciating, or rejecting, the sketch obvious in them-
selves.
The modern terms, all in French, were taken over from the language
of the Italian workshops.” The French esquisse, common in the nine-
teenth century, is derived from the older Italian schizzo, while ébauche,
equally common in Delacroix’s day, is derived from the Italian abozza.
In the Italian workshops of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
these terms preserved their original meaning; they referred to the stages
of preparing a work of art. The great codifier of Italian workshop and
critical language in the late seventeenth century, Filippo Baldinucci, has
left us a clear formulation of what these notions meant as technical
terms. Schizzo, he writes, “the painters say of their lighter touches of the
brush or the pencil, [touches] by which they indicate their ideas

555)
 Modern Theories of Art

(concetti) without bringing the [different] parts to perfection. This they

call sketching.” ”! And of abbozzare he writes that it is ‘“‘said of those
primary features that the painters make on canvases or panels, thus
beginning to shade the figures in a gross manner (alla grossa), and then
turning to other colors.” 7”
In the course of the eighteenth and particularly in the early nine-
teenth century, the sketch began to be seen in a different light. Now
the esquisse was considered not merely as a document of a preparatory
stage, a stage considered significant only because the final result, the
completed work of art, is of importance. Certain expressive and aes-
thetic qualities were now being discovered, and highly appreciated, and
they were recognized as characteristic of the sketch. In the intellectual
and artistic atmosphere of modern France, the new appreciation of the
sketch was not an isolated phenomenon. Its full significance becomes
manifest only when we realize that it is part of a larger syndrome. Just
as there was a high regard for the sketch, there was a growing appreci-
ation of drawings, bozzetti, and unfinished or even spoiled works by
great masters. One should also recall that it was in the nineteenth
century that the unfinished statue, the non finito, began to exert a magic
power over the minds of artists, critics, and broad audiences. Delacroix
himself, in the original note of May 9, 1853, that we have referred to
above, records that “the effect produced by the statues of Michelangelo
is due to certain disproportionate or unfinished parts which augment
the importance of the parts which are complete.” ”? Some years ago,
H. W. Janson investigated this syndrome of appreciating the unfin-
ished.?* What he calls “the autonomous fragment” —the torso, the
intentionally unfinished piece of statuary—is, as he says, one of the
most important legacies of nineteenth-century sculpture. This “legacy”
is, of course, the product of the same attitude that made people admire
a sketch. That a piece of sculpture could have been composed from the
outset as a fragment (as in the eighteenth century an edifice, usually in
a garden, could have been planned and constructed as a “ruin”)?° is an
important testimony to an attitude that is specifically “modern.” In
Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, unfinished works were unhesitatingly
discarded if it was believed that they could not be completed. In the

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nineteenth century, they came to be considered as “tokens of genius,”

they were bought at high prices, collected, and studied.
Precisely because we are here faced with a broad and complex
attitude, we cannot avoid inquiring into its underlying motives and
asking what it is that accounts for its surprising power. Several consid-
erations— obviously interrelated, yet not identical with each other—
offer themselves to the student. One circumstance is the inherent
proximity of the sketch to the process of creating a work of art. It is in
the nature of this process that its traces are effaced: the closer the work
of art comes to completion, the fewer traces of its becoming remain
visible. The great classicists, preaching the gospel of the finished and
polished work, indeed explicitly required the wiping away of any
residues of the stages in which it was shaped.”° In painting, the only
clear and visible vestige of the creative process is the sketch. The high
regard for the creative process, therefore, necessarily leads to an appre-
ciation of the sketch.
Another reason in support of the modern appreciation of the sketch
is sometimes reflected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought:
it is the belief that the sketch reflects the artist’s character and person-
ality more clearly than does the finished work. Once again we must go
back to Diderot, the thinker so crucial in the emergence of modern art
criticism. “Sketches,” he wrote, “generally possess a warmth that pic-
tures do not. They represent a state of ardour and pure verve on the
artist’s part, with no admixture of the affected elaboration introduced
by thought: through the sketch the painter’s very soul is poured forth
on the canvas.””’
Diderot’s praise of the sketch announces a distinction destined to
become popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The finish
of a painting, or sculpture, is seen as a matter of a broadly accepted but
—for this very reason—impersonal culture. The sketch, on the other
hand, is thought to precede the leveling impact of that anonymous
culture; it reveals the individual, the unique personality that is the true
origin of the work of art. To put it with some exaggeration, the creative
process is pictured as a clash between the artist’s individual personality,
on the one hand, and society’s impersonal culture, on the other. The

357
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 Modern Theories of Art

honored theme in reflections on painting. In the first volume of this

book, I had, indeed, to deal repeatedly with the contest between color
and line. We have seen how it appeared in the late centuries of
Antiquity, how it was suggested in the later Middle Ages, how it
acquired great significance in the late Renaissance, and how it domi-
nated the passionate debates carried on in the French Academy of the
seventeenth century.'°° In the first half of the nineteenth century, the
controversy concerning the specific values of color and line was force-
fully revived. A neoclassical trend championed the supposedly rational,
spiritual, and ascetic character of line. Another group, more difficult to
label under a single term, extolled the sensuous, evocative, and life-
giving power of color. Delacroix, it is well known, belonged to this
second group. He was, it has been said, a “propagandist for color.”
When we try to see his views on this subject in a broader context, it
turns out that his support for color is closely related to what imagina-
tion meant in his thought, and to how he saw the spectator’s role in
experiencing a work of art.
The most conspicuous feature of color, Delacroix believes, is that it
endows the painting with the “appearance of life.” Early in 1852 he
noted in his Journal: “Painters who are not colorists produce illumina-
tion and not painting. ... Color gives the appearance of life.” '°* This
latter phrase is a figure of speech known from Antiquity to Diderot. In
ancient literature it occurs in Plutarch, who in the second century A.D.
claimed that “color is more stimulating than line drawing because it is
life-like and creates an illusion.” '°> We shall not of course attempt to
trace the eventful history of these metaphors. Among modern writers |
shall mention only one of Delacroix’s most revered authors, Diderot. In
the Essay on Painting, Diderot said that “It is drawing that gives form to
the beings [figures], it is color that gives them life. Here is the divine
breath that animates them.’’!
Now, lifelikeness, appearance of life, animating breath—are not all
these descriptive phrases in fact very close to the metaphors used to
characterize imagination? That our artist used the same formulae for
describing the character and effect of both color and imagination
probably indicates a link between the two. What color provides—this
is what Delacroix seems to have thought—is one aspect of what

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 The Artist

imagination gives on a comprehensive scale. No wonder, then, that he

ascribes to color an effect similar to that characteristic of the sketch: it
stimulates the beholder’s fantasy. In his preparations for the Dictionnaire
that never came to fruition, he wrote: “Color: of its superiority or of
its exquisiteness, if you wish, with regard to its effect on the imagina-
tion.”!°’ There is a bond, then, between color and the spectator’s
imagination.
Here Delacroix goes beyond what was accepted in the long history
of reflection on color in painting. That color appeals to the emotions,
whereas line addresses itself to the rational faculties of the mind, was a
belief held in many periods. What is characteristic of the new age, and
particularly of Delacroix, is the explicit assumption that color stimulates
specifically the spectator’s imagination. Even for this connection one
could find a precedent in history. At the end of the seventeenth century,
Dupuy de Grez, the French writer on art, declared that “As design
strikes reason, so color strikes imagination.” '° Such an isolated state-
ment remained without further impact, however. It was only in the
middle of the nineteenth century that the underlying assumptions
become explicit. Delacroix, it can be said without much hesitation,
opens up a new stage in modern color theory by bringing hues into
connection with the spectator’s imagination.
Delacroix’s art theory, as also his art, has often been described as
“Romantic,” and there is indeed little doubt that he was influenced by
various trends in Romanticism. He drew from many intellectual and
aesthetic traditions, the most prominent among them being Diderot,
who represented for him the Enlightenment, and the writers and artists
of nineteenth-century Germany. He admired the work of Madame de
Staél, the influential French writer who, around the turn of the century,
had such close connections with the poets and painters of German
Romanticism. Her book on Germany ne played an important part in the
development of his own ideas. But while the influence of literary
Romanticism on Delacroix is certain, we must ask ourselves whether
we can label him a “Romantic.” Perhaps more than any other nine-
teenth-century painter who was closely related to Romanticism, Delacroix
goes beyond the intellectual limits of that movement, and marks the
transition to what we are in the habit of calling “the modern world.”

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3. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867)

His Writings on Art. “Glorifying the cult of images (my great, my unique,
my primary passion)”—this is how Baudelaire described his lifelong
attitude to the visual arts. Himself one of the great poets of French
literature, and one of the foremost literary critics of his century,
throughout his life he did indeed glorify painting and make images the
objects of cult and veneration. In 1845, as a young man of twenty-four,
he made his literary debut with a piece on painting, the review of the
Salon of that year. He continued to write on painting and sculpture
almost to the end of his life. But there is obviously more to his writings
on painting and sculpture than a continued dedication and an unhesi-
tating veneration of the arts of the eye. Baudelaire had a gospel to
preach about the nature of art, and it is a message of historical
significance. Every student trying to outline a history of modern re-
flection on art must admit that with Baudelaire a new age begins. Are
we, then, entitled to treat him as part of that stage in art theory that
we have tried to describe in the present volume? Should a presenta-
tion of theoretical reflection on art, as it emerged in the generation of
Winckelmann, not be brought to a conclusion before the appearance of
Baudelaire? While there is little doubt that Baudelaire marks the begin-
ning of a new stage of critical thought, however, he also marks the end
of a long and rich development in the theory of art. One of our aims in
this final section will, indeed, be to show what he drew from the past
and what are the major links that connect him with the great heritage
of thought on images. Moreover, many developments in the theory of
art from Winckelmann to the middle of the nineteenth century can be
seen in a new light if they are looked at from the vantage point of
Baudelaire.
To attempt an analysis of Baudelaire in the context of art theory is
to face a familiar difficulty. Baudelaire never produced a systematic
treatise on art. His writings pertinent to our subject consist of occa-
sional pieces, either critical reviews of exhibitions (the so called “Sa-
lons”) or discussions of individual artists (Guys, Delacroix, some cari-
caturists), and were usually composed for specific events. Some of the
articles he wrote on poets and composers (such as Edgar Allan Poe and

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Richard Wagner) may also contribute to our understanding of his views

on painting and sculpture. On the whole, then, his reflections on
painting are intimately related to special events or figures in the art life
of his time, and it does not at first seem that they will be able to convey
an overview of his art theory as a whole. In spite of these limitations,
however, it has always been obvious that Baudelaire has a “doctrine,”
or a message to deliver, that can be detached from any particular
occasion or figure and presented according to certain principles. Stu-
dents who, in one way or another, have touched on his views, in fact,
have never doubted that there is a Baudelaire “doctrine,” and that it
can be presented in systematic fashion. Here I shall first try to present,
in brief outline, the central components of this doctrine, and afterwards
attempt to shed some light on its links to past developments as well as
on its ramifications for the future.

Principles: Autonomy, Imagination, ‘‘Correspondences.”’ What is the purpose

of art? This is the subject of the first principle in Baudelaire’s theory of
art. His central tenet is that art is autonomous. This claim, valid for
both literature and the visual arts, forms the very basis of his aesthetics.
Baudelaire is perhaps the most important preacher of the autonomy of
art, and he is known for this belief more than for any other.
Not that he always held this view; he arrived at it after some soul
searching. In his youth he wrote contemptuously of the “puerile utopia
of the school of art for art, which by excluding morals, and often even
passion, was necessarily sterile.” ''° At this early stage of this thought
he accepted opinions and beliefs that, as we have seen, enjoyed wide
approval at the time, and were firmly rooted in a long history of the
philosophy of art. Even in the early or mid-nineteenth century, as we
have just noted, most trends of thought assigned to art a purpose that
was not art itself. The work of art, we have heard time and again, aims
at moving the passions of the audience, it strives to teach us a lesson or
to improve the morals of society. But Baudelaire dissociated himself
from these doctrines. He became, as we have said, the apostle of the
doctrine that art has its value in itself. As early as 1846, he condemned
philosophical poetry as “a false genre.” He deplored the view that art
should express ideas drawn from spheres as distant from art as science

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or politics. “Is art useful?” he asks in another article, and answers: “Yes.
Why? Because it is art.” mu
In an article called “Philosophical Art,” found after his death among
his papers (and most likely not yet in finished form), Baudelaire tries to
define “pure art.” He does so by opposing “pure” to “philosophical”
art. The opening sentences should be quoted in extenso.

What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation of an

evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world
external to the artist and the artist himself.
What is philosophic art according to the ideas of Chenavard and the
German school? It is a plastic art which sets itself up in place of books, by
which I mean as a rival to the printing press in the teaching of history, morals
and philosophy. ! RB

“Philosophic art,” then, is art produced not for its own sake but in
order to teach us something, or for some other external purpose. The
plastic arts, Baudelaire sarcastically remarks on the same page, were “‘to
paint the national archives of a people, and its religious beliefs.” “Pure
art,
>
on the other hand, is the art that has no external purpose. The
reference to the spectator, it is worth mentioning, is not denied in
“pure” art. To speak about “evocative magic” is possible only if there
is a spectator on whom this magic is to work. What is denied, or
overcome, is the gap between “the art” and the purpose in a painting
or a poem.
We cannot deal here with the more distant sources that may have
nourished Baudelaire’s concept of art as an autonomous value. Tracing
the history of views concerning the purposes of art may well require a
volume of its own. Here I shall only remark that the “art for art’s sake”
movement obviously forms part of the immediate background of
Baudelaire’s thought on the subject (though, being primarily a literary
movement, it has a somewhat distant relation to the theory of the visual
arts). Perhaps the most direct philosophical source is to be found in the
Paris school of idealistic aesthetics that was active and influential in the
early decades of the nineteenth century. This school is probably best
represented by Victor Cousin (1796-1867), philosopher and persuasive
teacher. In a lecture series delivered in 1817-1818 but published twenty

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years later (in a book that achieved great fame and popularity), we find
statements such as: “‘Art is not an instrument, it is in itself its own end”
or “What is required is religion for religion’s sake, morality for morali-
ty’s sake, just as art for art’s sake.” ''* Cousin himself pointed out the
theological origins of his philosophy. ““We love a beautiful or good
object,” he said, “because it is such, without prior consideration whether
this love may be useful to its object or to ourselves. All the stronger
reason that, when it ascends to God, love is a pure homage rendered to
his perfection; it is the natural overflow of the soul towards a being
who is infinitely lovable.” '!*
It is beyond our scope to explore the hidden motives that brought
about the “art for art’s sake” movement. To do this might well amount
to attempting an analysis of a significant part of modern culture and
society in general. Some scholars have seen in that movement, originally
a literary one, an afterlife of Romanticism. Revolt against the rigid laws
of classicism and the proclamation of a free art liberated from the
fetters of traditional poetics and rhetoric are the soil in which the new
attitude grew, they say.''° Another cause that has been put forward in
different forms is of a more social nature: it is the perception of the
artist as thoroughly alienated from his audience. Seeing art as autono-
mous, that is, as detached from any social context, is the result of this
alienation.''® The tone that Baudelaire employs in speaking of large
audiences would seem to support this explanation. It is a tone that, in
its harshness, hostility, and contempt, is in itself vivid testimony to the
alienation of progressive artists and of the critics supporting them, on
the one hand, from the general audience, on the other. The broad
public, in Baudelaire’s words, is characterized by “the stupidity of the
multitude,” it suffers from the “disease of imbeciles.”''’ In former
periods also, the public was occasionally criticized, but it is difficult to
conceive of such large-scale contempt for the “crowd.”
So far we have looked at Baudelaire’s views of the purpose for which
a work of art is, or should be, produced. But how does it come into
being? If the first topic we have outlined is concerned with the place of
art in culture or society, the latter is focused on art itself.
Baudelaire wholly rejects the inherited opinion, which was almost an
axiom in the art theory of most periods, that a picture comes into being

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by representing nature. He in fact constantly attacked the time-honored

theory that art is an imitation of nature. This total rejection of the
imitation theory has two aspects. First, he questions the philosophical
assumptions of the theory. In criticizing the Salon of 1859, he wrote:
“In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand different ways,
‘Copy nature; just copy nature.’ ... And this doctrine (the enemy of
art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts. ...”
He wants to ask these “‘doctrinaires” several questions. One is “whether
they were quite certain of the existence of external nature.” After all,
we can only depict what we see and feel, the outside world as it is
reflected in our minds. None of us, and most of all the artist, can go
beyond our personal, subjective experience. “The artist, the true artist,
the true poet, should only paint in accordance with what he sees and
with what he feels.” ''® We shall not here attempt to explore the
philosophical aspects of Baudelaire’s statement. Whatever one may
think of his attitude as a philosophical argument, it is obvious that he is
here questioning the very basis of what had been the credo of art theory
throughout the centuries, namely, that we can depict nature.
The other aspect of Baudelaire’s rejection of the imitation theory,
perhaps even more important than the philosophical side, is the emo-
tional connotation the “imitation of nature” acquires in his thought,
and the tone in which he expresses his rejection of this theory. Thus he
speaks of the “silly cult of nature.” Imitating nature is equated with a
loss of art’s self-esteem. Looking at the painting produced in his day, he
finds that “Every day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing
down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and
more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.” LS
The anger and contempt so clearly manifested in his rejection of
realism, both in painting and in literature, vividly testify to what I here
wish to point out. Realism, he says, is “a disgusting insult thrown into
the face of all analysts, a vague and elastic word which means for the
vulgar not a new method of creation but the minute description of
inessentials.”” Equally telling, in this respect, is Baudelaire’s open disdain
for photography. The very emergence of photography seems to him to
follow directly from the high regard for realism in art. In his important
review of the Salon of 1859, he devoted an article to the new medium

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of photography. “In matters of painting and sculpture,” he wrote, “the

present-day Credo of the sophisticated ... is this: ‘I believe in Nature
(a timid and dissident sect would wish to exclude the more repellent
objects of nature, such as skeletons and chamber-pots). . . . A revengeful
God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his
Messiah.” !7°
In an original and profound insight, Baudelaire declares that the true
aim of realism is the representation of a world free of, or alien to,
human experience. This idea is only casually stated, but its significance
is so far-reaching that we must note it. Only if we see the hidden
motives and aims of realism as he saw them can we understand what
true artistic creation meant to him. In his seminal reviews of the 1859
Salon, Baudelaire contrasts the realists, whom he chooses to call “posi-
tivists,” with what he calls “the imaginists.” The realist seems to say:
“I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be,
supposing that I did not exist.’ In other words, the universe without
man. The others however— the ‘imaginatives’—say, ‘I want to illumi-
nate things with my mind, and to project their reflection upon other
minds.’ ”!?' Here we have reached another basic principle of Baude-
laire’s theory of art, his doctrine of the imagination. If realism aims to
depict a nonhuman world, imagination conjures up a world that is
nothing but human.
The modern student asks, first of all, what is the specific place of
imagination, as Baudelaire understands it, in the order of things. Does
the study of the artist’s imagination belong in the domain of psychology,
or should it rather be approached as a kind of metaphysical reality? To
Baudelaire, artistic imagination is “the queen of the faculties,” and he
endows it, though subtly and ambiguously, with metaphysical connota-
tions. It thus hovers between the domain of the empirical and the
metaphysical. ‘The imagination is an almost divine faculty,” our author
says, which at once perceives certain hidden relationships in the world. '”?
The imagination has the power to compensate for the deficiencies of
nature. “The imagination owes [this power] to its divine origin.” '?3 He
even speaks, though vaguely (so that the reader is not sure whether he
is to understand the wording as metaphoric or as literal), of a “universal
; ee 124
imagination. »

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The distinctive mark of the artist’s imagination, as Baudelaire sees it,

is its productivity, its generating power. It becomes the creative faculty
par excellence. In his Salon review of 1859, he quotes approvingly (and
in the original English) from Catherine Crow’s The Night Side of Nature,
which appeared in 1848. There the author distinguishes, in the vein of
Coleridge and other English writers of the early nineteenth century,
between “fancy” and the higher forms of imagination. The higher
function of imagination, Mrs. Crow writes, “in as much as man is made
in the likeness of God, bears a distant relation to that sublime power by
which the Creator projects, creates, and upholds his universe.” Vote
likeness to God consists in the generating, creative quality. It is, in
Baudelaire’s quotation from Mrs. Crow, “a constructive imagination.”
How, in Baudelaire’s view, does that creative, or “constructive,”
imagination work? Does the artist’s fantasy conjure up images out of
nothing, that is, images of objects that have never existed and have
nothing to do with the impressions we receive from the outside world?
Or does it rather combine in a different pattern the shapes and figures
we are familiar with from our experience in this world? This is, of
course, an old question, one that inevitably emerged at every stage of
art theory in which the problem of the artist’s imagination was posed
anew or acquired renewed significance. Because the artist’s imagination
occupies such a central place in Baudelaire’s theory, the student of his
thought must repeat these old questions. Now Baudelaire, as we know,
was not a systematic philosopher, and one is not surprised to find that
on different occasions he gave different answers to the same questions;
sometimes on the very same page we find different opinions as to how
the imagination works.
One answer adumbrated in Baudelaire’s writings is a modern formu-
lation of the creatio ex nihilo doctrine. In original metaphorical terms he
tries to suggest that the work of art is an altogether new reality, one
that is not founded on any preceding concrete existence. “A good
picture, which is a faithful equivalent of the dream which has begotten
it, should be brought into being like a world.” !7 To make sure that
the concept of “dream” is correctly understood, he adds, “by this word
I do not mean the riotous Bedlams of the night, but rather the vision
that comes from intense meditation.”

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What Baudelaire understood by imagination can also be seen by exam-

ining his precise motives for rejecting realism. In the past, the unselec-
tive, naturalistic copying of “nature” had frequently been censured, the
reason for these rejections being that an uncritical copying of what can
be seen around us perpetuates all the deformations and imperfections
of the outside world. To such naturalistic depiction, all periods have
opposed an idealizing rendering of that very same reality, that is, a
rendering that corrects nature’s “faults.” This motivation may also be
found in Baudelaire’s thought. His major reason for the rejection of
realism, however, is a different one. A precise copy of the outside world
merely duplicates what already exists. Real creation, one infers from
this criticism of the realistic approach, is the projection of something
that does not yet exist. “I consider it useless and tedious to represent
what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I
prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.” hae Though
the imperfections of nature are also suggested, the major reason is clear:
the triviality of what exists. Imagination, it follows by implication, is
the creation of something that does not yet exist.
In addition to this radical interpretation of imagination, Baudelaire
seems to have entertained yet another view of how the artist’s fantasy
works. In this view, the artist, unlike God, does not invent concrete
images and visual impressions; his imagination is really nothing but a
rearrangement of “raw material” that he has received from an outside
source. What arises from the artist’s soul is the principle of composi-
tion. Imagination, he says, “decomposes all creation, and with the raw
materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose
origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it creates
a world, it produces a sensation of newness.” io
A careful reader of Baudelaire’s writings on painting is forced to
conclude that he conceived of a picture completely invented by the
artist as the highest aim a painter can strive for, though it may well be
beyond human reach. Vaguely he foresees a painting without a subject
or, at least, without a recognizable material subject. Already in his
reviews of the 1846 Salon, he had said that “the right way to know if a
picture is melodious is to look at it from far enough away to make it
impossible to understand its subject or to distinguish its lines. If it is

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melodious, it already has a meaning and has already taken its place in
your store of memories.” '29 He also claims, in another place, that line
and color are “absolutely independent of the subject of the picture.”
Clearly we are here faced with a prophet of abstract art, that is, an art
that is totally the product of the artist’s imagination.
To create a work of art that is completely drawn from the artist’s
imagination may be a supreme aim, yet it is hard, or even impossible,
to achieve. In practice, the artist takes most of his material from nature.
This, however, does not compel us to accept the doctrine that art is an
imitation of nature. Baudelaire quotes his older contemporary, Heinrich
Heine, with approval. In reviewing Delacroix, Heine wrote: “In artistic
matters, I am a supernaturalist. I believe that the artist cannot find all
his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to him
in his soul, like an innate symbology of innate ideas, and at the same
instant.” '°° We can say with Wellek that “Baudelaire here seems to
agree with an ultimately Neoplatonic trust in an inner model, in the
vision of ‘the artist who dominates the model as the Creator dominates
His creation.’ ”'?!
The student of Baudelaire’s theory of art is here faced with a
contradiction. On the one hand, our author emphasizes time and again
that true creation means drawing from the artist’s soul, from his
imagination. On the other, he does not altogether isolate the painter or
the poet from the world surrounding them. On the contrary, it is the
hallmark of the artist, as we remember, that he is able to discern hidden
relations between the different objects in the outside world. How are
we to understand this puzzle?
We come then to another central subject of Baudelaire’s theory of
art, his views of the “‘outside world.” | shall touch on this subject
briefly, and I shall of course do so only insofar as the “world,” or
whatever else that external reality may be called, is the object of, or is
related to, the artist’s imagination. We must keep in mind however that
Baudelaire’s views concerning the reality surrounding us, even as it is
related to art, were not shaped by aesthetic motives alone; other
concerns and beliefs played an important part in forming them. Early in
his life, our author passed through a “mystic” or “occult” stage. Later
on, an aspiration towards mysticism remained alive in his attitudes and

37°
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thought. He naturally combined these mystic leanings with his aesthetic

concerns: art, at its highest, was to be conceived as a semimystical
vision and ecstasy. Even in such a designation he may have been
following traditions with which he was acquainted. '?* This background
is of importance for an understanding of the central concepts he
employs when he discusses “the world,” namely, “correspondences”
and “hieroglyphs.”
These concepts have a long history in European thought and letters,
particularly in the occult traditions of Western culture. We cannot of
course go into the early phases of ideas about analogies, correspon-
dences, and hieroglyphs; for our purpose it will be sufficient to recall
that these notions played a significant part in eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century occultism and in philosophies with affinities to the
occult. The eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772) is of particular significance in our context. His
large and prolix opus is dominated by a certain conceptual model that
is perhaps best and most concisely stated in the title of a short treatise
(not common in the work of an author whose major work extends over
twelve mighty tomes), which, freely translated, would read something
like “Hieroglyphic Key to the Natural and Spiritual Secrets by Way of
Representations and Correspondences.” It was published posthumously,
in 1784, in London. The central proposition of this essay is that
throughout the universe a correspondence prevails between things
spiritual and natural, that thus things occupying a lower rank in the
order of things reflect those belonging to a higher order.'3? This theory
of correspondences, it need hardly be stressed, forms the core of the
Neoplatonic doctrine of the image, a doctrine that had many versions.
Swedenborg articulates the most extreme and openly mystical version
of the doctrine, but even in this extreme form the theory of reflections
and correspondences enjoyed a long history and a great deal of influ-
ence. Jakob Boehme, whose influence on early Romantic thought on
painting has been mentioned in a previous chapter, presented it under
the formulation of signatura rerum. Swedenborg conceived “correspon-
dences” as a basic form of knowing the world. In every single object a
secret is hidden. Had we the power to unriddle these secrets, even the
stones would preach the gospel of God.

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Swedenborg erected an edifice of cosmic history (a strange concoc-

tion of different sources) and in this structure he gave hieroglyphs an
important place, as the visual formulation communicating the corre-
spondences. Hieroglyphs were supposed to have originated at an early
stage of world history, a stage in which mythical thought prevailed.
Their essence is that they indicate the spiritual, celestial meaning hidden
in material objects and their images. The Egyptians knew the correct
reading of the signs; they still had the key. But in the ages following the
Egyptian kingdom, that sapientia veterum was lost. “To the Ancients,”
Swedenborg confidently claims, “the foremost knowledge was that
of correspondences, but today it [this knowledge] is lost” (E. Benz
Swedenborg [Munich, 1948], p. 411).
Baudelaire himself mentions Swedenborg as one of his sources; other
writers he adduces (such as Lavater) were also influenced by Sweden-
borg’s thought. This does not mean, of course, that Baudelaire was a
faithful follower of Swedenborg’s spiritualism. We do not have to read
him as an actual mystic to recognize that he used the mystical theory of
correspondences and transformed it into an original part of his reflec-
tions on the art of painting. His creed was ultimately aesthetic, and the
theory of correspondences is adopted not as it stands but as it suited
the context of the artist and his work.

We arrive at that truth that everything is hieroglyphic, and we know that

the symbols are only relatively obscure according to the purity, the good will,
and the inborn clearsightedness of souls. Now what is a poet if not a translator,
a decipherer? In excellent poets there is not a single metaphor, comparison, or
epithet which could not be a mathematically exact adaptation to the present
circumstance, because these comparisons, metaphors, and epithets are drawn
from the inexhaustible fund of universal analogy. '**

That Baudelaire did not have a literal reading of the doctrine of

correspondences, that in his thought this theory is not a piece of
Swedenborgian cosmology, but is rather seen from an aesthetic point of
view, and thus has a metaphorical character, is obvious from the way
he employs the term correspondances. His article on Théophile Gautier,
poet and critic (1811~1872), provides a good example of his usage of
the term. Gautier, we read here, has “an immense inborn intelligence

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of universal correspondence and symbolism, the repertory of all meta-

phor.” '* The artist, he says elsewhere, plays on “the immense key-
board of correspondences.” '*° And in still another place he says that
“the entire visible universe appears as but a storehouse of images and
signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is
a sort of pasturage which the imagination must digest and trans-
form.” !37
Now we can come back to the starting point of this section. We
asked how Baudelaire could claim that the picture should follow from
the imagination and still represent a landscape or a portrait, a genre
scene or a still life. How can the painting be altogether human and still
represent a piece of outside nature? A partial answer at least is given by
making the doctrine of hidden analogies the cornerstone of a theory of
art. By depicting the world as a result, at least in part, of imagination
and introspection, the artist overcomes the gulf between subject and
object, man and nature. This doctrine also explains human empathy
with inanimate nature. The artist humanizes “not only the form of a
being external to man, vegetable, or mineral, but also its physiognomy,
its look, its sadness, its tenderness, its bounding joy, its repulsive hate,
its enchantment, or its horror: in other words, all that is human in
anything whatsoever, and also all that is divine, sacred, or diabolic.” !*®

The Process of Creation. The great significance Baudelaire accords to the

artist’s imagination together with his belief in correspondences make the
process in which the painter actually produces the picture a kind of
testing ground, where these agents can perhaps actually be observed in
action. The student therefore naturally asks how our poet-critic saw,
and understood, the process of producing a work of art. Attempting to
answer this question, one soon discovers how far Baudelaire deviated
from old and established traditions (some of which he embraced in
other respects). But one also learns that in many regards he differs from
what is now commonplace wisdom. A late twentieth-century reader
would often not consider him “modern.”
We must begin with Baudelaire’s profound distrust of inspiration as
the only, or even major, source of the artist’s work. In the course of
years he came back to this attitude, expressing time and again his

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doubts of inspiration’s power. In this context, we should note the

emphasis he places on the need for, and value of, skill. To young writers
he insisted that “daily work serves inspiration,” and he ridiculed the
view that inspiration can replace other requirements. He even attacks
the idol of Romanticism, the genius. “Youth concludes that it need not
submit to any exercise. It does not know that a man of genius . . . must,
like any apprenticed acrobat, risk his bones a thousand times in private
before he walks the rope in public; that inspiration, in short, is only the
reward of daily exercise.” =? Nothing could be more removed from his
mind than the Romantic image of the artist, as expressed, say, by a
Wackenroder, an artist who shapes his work as in a trance, fired by the
appearance in a dream.
Baudelaire, it goes without saying, does not speak persuasively in
favor of skill and technique in order to enhance the virtues a bourgeois
society would embrace; his appreciation of disciplined, rational proce-
dures and of well-established know-how follows from his understanding
of what the creative process actually is. A famous sentence in his 1863
article on Delacroix (written immediately after the painter’s death)
deserves closer attention in the present context. “Delacroix,” > we read
here, “‘was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to
seek the means of expressing it in the most visible way.” '40 There is,
he says, summing up this polarity, “a duality of nature” in the artist.
Whatever this statement may actually tell us about Delacroix, it surely
reveals something essential about Baudelaire’s perception of the basic
conditions in which the artist has to work and in-which he produces
his work. It also indicates some of his views concerning the creative
process itself.
The structural “duality of [the artist’s] nature” is reflected in the
creative process. Here it becomes a double attitude of the painter or
poet to his subject. On the one hand, the artist identifies with what he
represents (the part of “passion”); on the other, he maintains an
emotional distance from his subject (the part of “cold determination”).
Once again, Baudelaire nowhere systematically presents his views about
the relations between these two poles. Yet since the matter is of obvious
and crucial importance for the theory of art and the artist, we must

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deal with it, though much will have to be inferred rather than directly
quoted.
The careful reader cannot help feeling that Baudelaire stresses the
part of “cold determination” far more than the part of “passion.”
Imagination, we read, is a most precious faculty, but “this faculty
remained impotent and sterile if it is not served by a resourceful
skill... .” '*' Now, the notion of skill, we should keep in mind, connotes
not only the manual dexterity and technical ability necessary to translate
the visions seen with one’s inner eye into actual paintings that can be
seen by everyone; “skill” also marks an attitude of the artist to what he
renders. It is the attitude of emotional distance and restraint. Baudelaire
does not picture the artist as “possessed” by his vision, to use a neo-
romantic formula; on the contrary, he dominates it. The great artist,
our poet seems to have believed, feels no inner compulsion to paint
only one kind of theme or to depict his subjects in only one specific
manner. On the contrary: Baudelaire praises Delacroix because he
“Joved and had the ability to paint everything, and knew also how to
appreciate every kind of talent.” he:
Baudelaire’s emphasis on what we have called the attitude of distance
can be inferred from still another reflection. For centuries, or even
longer, writers on art kept asking if the painter must himself experience
the emotions he expresses in his work. The old Horatian maxim that
haunted art theory for ages claimed that it is the artist’s emotional
identification with what he represents what accounts for the effect of
his work on the audience: Si vis mi flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi (If
you wish me to weep, you must first express suffering yourself yealt
was this maxim that in Romanticism led to the concept of the “sincere
artist.”
Now, in his writings on art, it may be worth noting, Baudelaire
nowhere refers to this famous Horatian statement, though he often
speaks of Horace’s poetics. Moreover, it would often seem that he sees
the artist’s ability to hide his personal feelings and completely retreat
behind what he represents as a supreme achievement. “The intoxication
of art hides the terror of the abyss: for genius can play comedy on the
edge of the tomb.” Wellek correctly sums up this attitude by saying

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that “the clown condemned to death never shows a trace of his

imminent fate in the superb performance of his act.” '** The creative
process is one in which technique, skill, and discipline play a crucial
part.
Baudelaire’s analysis of the creative process may also explain his
harsh criticism of a personal artistic emotionalism. He is repelled by
this “egotistic” attitude of the artist. In his criticism, as often happens,
his sarcastic language knows little restraint. “The apes of sentiment are,
in general, bad artists”: this is a typical formulation. “The cry of feeling
is always absurd,” is another. And speaking of the “poetry of the heart,”
that attitude in art that ascribes infallibility to truthful passion, he
simply says that it is an aberration in aesthetics.
'*° Does all this mean
that he conceived the process of shaping a work of art as some kind of
computation? Obviously this is not the case. He knows of the artist’s
intoxication, but it is an intoxication with art rather than with some
particular emotion. Ultimately it is the excitement with art, not with
any particular passion, that the painter and the poet should transmit to
the audience.

Aesthetic of the Ugly. The new view of art as existing in its own right, and
the conception of intoxication with art as such rather than with a
specific passion or emotion, enlarged—or even transformed— the do-
main of theoretical reflection. These notions were closely linked with
one of the most original departures in aesthetic thought, a departure
typical of the modern age that has profoundly influenced both the
theory and the practice of the visual arts. In Karl Rosenkranz’s famous
formulation, to be discussed in the present section, this departure may
be called the “‘aesthetics of the ugly.” In the process that brought about
that new attitude Baudelaire played a crucial part.
The broad context in which Baudelaire treats the theme is significant
for us; it may both indicate its historical origin and support his argu-
ment. In 1863, Baudelaire published his long essay “The Painter of
Modern Life,” perhaps the most programmatic statement among all his
writings on painting. One of the short chapters into which this essay is
divided is called “In Praise of Makeup.” '4© What Baudelaire wishes to
state in this essay, written late in his life, follows from the general ideas

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we have so far referred to. The section he calls “In Praise of Makeup”
is, in fact, a pointed, perhaps somewhat exaggerated, summary of his
views on art. It is a eulogy of the artificial, and an attempt to establish
the superiority of the contrived over the natural, of the products of
human skill and inventiveness over the results of nature. In the eight-
eenth century, Baudelaire reminds his readers, “Nature was taken as
ground, source and type of all possible Good and Beauty.” '*” Being
natural was tantamount to being good and beautiful (and looking
natural, we may add, still has the same ring in the language of present-
day advertising). Nature was the norm in ethics as well as in art. This
view, Baudelaire is convinced, is profoundly erroneous. He lists the
different kinds of violence to which nature leads us. Murder, parricide,
and cannibalism are “natural.” The worship of nature and the natural
he calls ‘‘a blindness.” The eighteenth-century negation of original sin,
Baudelaire specifically points out, had no mean part in this “blindness,”
that is, in the adoration and idealization of nature.
It has been pointed out that Baudelaire may have been influenced
here by Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), a logician and writer who,
more than a generation earlier, had attacked the Enlightenment vener-
ation of nature on theological grounds. How, he asks rhetorically, can
one blind oneself to the extent of looking in nature for causes when
nature itself is only a product? '**
Coming back to Baudelaire’s 1863 essay, we can see how he main-
tains, and tries to carry through, the superiority of the artificial over
the natural. Makeup, he declares, should not aim at making the woman
who applies it look natural: “face painting should not be used with the
vulgar, unavowable object of imitating fair Nature and of entering into
a competition with youth.” !*° Here he adds the important sentence:
“Who would dare to assign to art the sterile function of imitating
Nature?” The beauty of artifice is completely divorced from nature.
That divorce brings up a new question: if the beauty of art is so
completely independent of nature that it can be applied to everything,
would it not follow that it can also be applied to what in nature is ugly,
deformed, and repulsive? We cannot, so it seems, avoid the paradoxical
notion of the beauty of the ugly. The question is not altogether new.
Beneath the surface, as it were, it existed, and was felt, whenever

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thinkers who believed that art is an embodiment of beauty reflected on

its relationship with nature. One recalls Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous
description of some Romanesque imagery as “deformed beauty, beauti-
ful deformation,” '*° composed in a period that is seemingly as remote
as possible from our problem. It was, however, only when art was
explicitly conceived as autonomous—that is, in the mid-nineteenth
century —that the notion of an “aesthetics of the ugly” could become
fully manifest. It is surely not a matter of chance that Baudelaire, the
advocate of an autonomous art, played such a prominent role in
articulating the problem.
In literary theory, the modern concern with the ugly and its connec-
tion with the beautiful did not emerge with Baudelaire or Rosenkranz.
As Hans Robert Jauss has shown in an interesting essay,'”! it originated
with Victor Hugo. In 1827, the poet prefaced his play Cromwell with a
lengthy theoretical discussion in which he presented an explanation of
why the ugly should be part of the subject matter of art.'°* He also
suggested a conception of the ugly that differed from those given at
previous stages of reflection. The classical tradition took it as axiomatic
that it is the aim of art to manifest beauty. For the ugly, then, there is
no room in art. The ugly is nothing but the obverse of beauty; it is the
absence of beauty that makes something ugly. Karl Rosenkranz in his
Aesthetik des Hasslichen (Aesthetics of the Ugly) put it as succinctly as his
philosophical language would allow: “The beautiful is the positive
presupposition of the ugly. Were there no beautiful, no ugly would
exist; it [the ugly] exists only as its [the beautiful’s] negation.” he
This concept of the ugly was clearly not sufficient for the theoretical
reflections of an age that, like the nineteenth century, was often
fascinated by the strange beauty residing in a pictorial representation of
a deformed body or a distorted object. “Make the nature you represent
beautiful”: this advice, so often given to artists from the time of Alberti
to that of Ingres, could here obviously not provide the answers certain
artists and thinkers were looking for.
Victor Hugo defended the depiction of the ugly in art on the basis
that it leads to a full cognition and rendering of nature. Greek art
idealized nature, but, following Victor Hugo, we have to say that
precisely for this reason it was one-sided. Victor Hugo sensed how

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much the historical development of the great religions meant to art.

“Christianity brought poetry to truth,” he says. “Like Christianity, the
modern muse sees things from a higher and larger vantage point. It
senses that in creation not everything is humanly beautiful, that the ugly
exists alongside the beautiful, the deformed next to the graceful, the
grotesque behind the sublime, the evil with the good, the shadow with
the light.” 'S4 The basic reason for representing the ugly in art is that it
exists in reality.
Both Hugo and Rosenkranz were aware of pictorial representations
of deformed figures, but the visual arts were not at the center of their
reflections. Hugo mentions them in passing, but Rosenkranz is more
explicit. He has a special category called “the ugly in art.”§>? Itnis
significant, I think, that Rosenkranz, although intellectually and physi-
cally far removed from France and its avant-garde movements in art
theory, suggests in his philosophical idiom a view very close to the ideas
of the /’art pour l’art movement in France. Art, he claims early in his
discussion of the ugly, is an absolute value. “The beautiful, being the
appearance of the idea to the senses, is absolute in itself, and does not
need support from outside of itself; a strengthening by means of
contrast.” But if one wishes to present the idea in its completeness, one
also has to allow for “the possibility of the negative.” The Greeks, to be
sure, concentrated on the representation of ideal figures, but they also
rendered “the hecatoncheires [giants with a hundred hands], cyclops,
satyrs, graiae [gray-haired female protectresses of the gorgons], ompusae
[filthy demons], harpies, chimaera.” Like Victor Hugo almost a genera-
tion earlier, Karl Rosenkranz sees in religious changes a key to the
unriddling of our problem. With the Christian religion, he continues
the discussion from which we have just quoted, “the religion that
grasped evil at its very root and taught us to overcome it, the ugly is
fully introduced into the world of art.” iS The “very root” of evil is, of
course, the devil. The satanic, or diabolic, is the origin of ugliness.
Although Hugo and Rosenkranz thus accept the rendering of the
ugly in art, their treatment of pictorial representations remains abstract.
Even the list of monsters that the Greek artists supposedly carved in
stone is taken from literary sources rather than from looking at statues
and paintings. Questions broader than the sources of certain monsters

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 Modern Theories of Art

also remain without clarification. In what genre of painting and sculp-

ture does the ugly appear? A reader looking for an answer to this
question would search in vain in the writings of either Hugo or
Rosenkranz.
It was thus mainly Baudelaire who explored the ugly as the subject
matter of concrete categories in visual art. The reader familiar with
Baudelaire is not surprised that the poet-critic nowhere defines ugliness
in any precise way, nor that he never offers an explanation of how the
artistic rendering of an ugly object can be perceived as beautiful. Yet
without encountering any systematic exposition, one feels that for many
years the problem was present in his thought. He often alludes to it. In
addition to some scattered references, the essay on “The Essence of
Laughter” (written in 1855) and the essays on French and on foreign
caricaturists (both written in 1857) offer important leads to his thought
on the ugly in art.
Ugliness, we understand by following Baudelaire’s trend of thought,
is mainly what is opposed to harmony; it is the unresolved tension, the
conflict of contradictory forces that has been left standing as it is.
Contradiction and tension fascinated Baudelaire; he was under the spell
of the paradox. This can be seen, first of all, in his poetry, but it also
emerges from his criticism. The essay on laughter shows with particular
clarity the spell that paradox held for him. “Laughter is satanic: it is
thus profoundly human. ... And since laughter is essentially human, it
is, in fact, essentially contradictory; that is to say it is at once a token
of an infinite grandeur and an infinite misery.-... It is from the
perpetual collision of these two infinites that laughter is struck.” ag?
The strikingly nonharmonious, the unresolved tension, the screeching
dissonance are manifested not only in behavior and experience (such as
laughter); there is a category of objects and shapes that embody these
qualities and characteristics. This is the category of the grotesque. As
we have seen, by mid-nineteenth century the grotesque was casting a
spell over the minds of artists and writers. Viollet-le-Duc revived (and
modernized) the Gothic gargoyles of the cathedrals, and wrote beauti-
fully about them. At about the same time, Champfleury not only
composed his great work on caricature but also prefaced a book of
reproductions (drawings) of Gothic grotesques.'°* For Baudelaire, the

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grotesque found its most fascinating expression in caricature and in

fantastic art. His essays on caricature yield rich results.!°? His treatment
of Goya is particularly indicative of his views on the ugly and deformed
as a component of art.
Baudelaire’s response to Goya’s work in general, and to Los Caprichos
in particular, is significant far beyond the limits of mere art criticism.
Some of his poems in Les fleurs du mal are inspired by Goya’s etchings, °°
and in his critical discussion of the painter’s work he brings up more
questions of broad theoretical interest than in most of his writings on
individual artists. “Goya,” he says, “is always a great and often a
terrifying artist.” '©! His caricatures, Baudelaire points out, draw from
the great Spanish tradition of satire, but to that tradition Goya unites
“a spirit far more modern.” What Baudelaire here calls “modern” has
little to do with subject matter. It is the breaking through of sacrosanct
borders, the questioning of established, time-honored concepts of what
the art of painting can, and what it cannot, do. Goya has “a love of the
ungraspable, a feeling for violent contrasts, for the blank horrors of
nature and for human countenances weirdly animalized by circum-
stances.”” Such violent transformation, bringing together features and
connotations that are naturally separate, is the very opposite of what
the theory of decorum taught was beautiful. ““Goya’s great merit consists
in having created a credible form of the monstrous.” The monstrous, of
course, is the ugly whose deformations go beyond the credible. Goya
makes us believe in it. “All those distortions, those bestial faces, those
diabolic grimaces of his are impregnated with humanity.”
The student will evidently ask what is the value of these convincing
representations of the deformed. On what grounds does Baudelaire
defend, or justify, the rendering of the ugly in art? Here we cannot rely
on Hugo’s arguments. Victor Hugo justified depicting the ugly in art on
the basis that it exists in nature. Its rendering in literature and painting
amounts to giving a fuller account of reality. But Baudelaire praises
Goya for having conjured up in his work ugly, deformed, hideous
creatures that do not exist in reality. His witches and monsters are
creatures of the imagination, and he is specifically praised for making
the unreal credible. The ultimate reason Baudelaire can give for praising
Goya’s distorted creatures is that they are beautiful.

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 Modern Theories of Art

His monsters are born viable, harmonious. ... Even from the special
viewpoint of natural history it would be hard to condemn them, so great is
the analogy and harmony between the parts of their being. In a word, the line
of suture, the point of junction between the real and the fantastic is impossible
to grasp; it is a vague frontier which not even the subtlest analyst could trace,
such is the extent to which the transcendent and the natural concur in his art.

The general conclusion to be drawn from Baudelaire’s analysis of

Goya’s monsters is clear. In the final analysis, the beauty of art is
independent of the beauty of nature. The artist can produce a vision
that is ugly in terms of natural creatures, but that has a fascinating
beauty of its own. It is the ultimate triumph of the art for art’s sake
principle. The artist’s imagination is independent even of the universal
structure of beauty.

NOTES

1. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767). I am using the facsimile reprint,
edited by John L. Mahoney (Gainesville, Fla., 1964). Page references (given in
parentheses in the text) refer to this edition. And see the interesting discussion
in James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981), pp. 84 ff.
2. See Theories of Art: From Plato to Winkelmann, pp. 171 ff.
3. See George Sidney Brett, A History of Psychology, 3 vols. (London and New York,
1912-1932).
4. See above, Chapter 3, especially pp. 157 ff.
5. Charles Batteaux, Les beaux arts réduits d un méme principe (Paris, 1746). Batteaux
also published a five-volume work, Principe de Ia littérature (Paris, 1764).
6. Sulzer’s major work is Allgemeine Theorie der schénen Kiinste, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1771-
1774).
7. See, for instance, Jan Bialostocki, “The Renaissance Concept of Nature and
Antiquity,” The Renaissance and Mannerism (Acts of the Twentieth International
Congress of the History of Art), (Princeton, 1963), II, pp. 19-30.
8. The best discussion remains Erwin Panofsky’s Idea (New York, 1968; originally
published in German in 1924).
9. I refer, of course, to the famous story of Zeuxis’s statue of Helen (or Venus),
which was composed by imitating the most beautiful parts of the bodies of the
five most beautiful maidens of Croton. For some sources, see Theories of Art, pp.
125 ff., and especially Panofsky, Idea, pp. 15 ff.

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 The Artist

. For Mengs’s concept of the Ideal, see Monika Sutter, Die kunsttheoretischen Begriffe
des Malerphilosophen Anton Raphael Mengs (Munich, 1968), pp. 30 ff. And see above,
pp. 90 ff.
. For Sulzer’s concept of the creative imagination, which is implied rather than
explicitly stated, see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Roman-
ticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 103 ff.
. Goethe’s review of Sulzer’s work on aesthetics, published in 1772, is often
reprinted. See Goethes Werke, Hamburg edition (Munich, 1949-1962), vol. 12
(1962), pp. 17 ff.
138 I shall use the English edition of Wackenroder’s work translated and annotated
by Mary Hurst Schubert under the title Confessions and Fantasies (University Park,
Pa. and London, 1971), which includes several of Wackenroder’s writings.
References will be given, in parentheses, in the text, the figure referring to the
page number of the English translation.
14. H. Woelfflin, Kleine Schriften (Basle, 1944), p. 205.
Ld: See Mary Hurst Schubert’s introduction to her translation of Wackenroder’s
writings (Confessions and Fantasies), esp. pp. 44 ff.
. For K. P. Moritz’s concepts, see Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik and Kunsttheorie,
II (Leipzig, 1924), pp. 276 ff. And see also J. Engell, The Creative Imagination, pp.
113 ff.
. For Vasari’s statement, see Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and
Architects, trans. A. B. Hinds (Everyman’s Library) (New York, 1927), II, pp. 176
ff. For Leonardo’s statement (emphasizing mainly the contemplation of old walls,
but also mentioning clouds), see Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. A.
Philip McMahon (Princeton, 1956), I, pp. 50 f. Renaissance thought on the
inspiration the artist gets by looking at the clouds has been brilliantly discussed
by H. W. Janson in 1/6 Studies (New York, n. d.), pp. 53-69. I don’t know of a
similar investigation of this interesting subject in Romantic thought.
18. For this famous reference, see Panofsky, Idea, pp. 59 ff.
19. By Marianne Frey, in Der Kiinstler und sein Werk bei W. H. Wackenroder und E. T. A.
Hoffmann: Vergleichende Studien zur romantischen Kunstanschauung (Bern, 1970), pp.
19 ff.
20. See August Langen, Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus (Tiibingen, 1954).
JN See Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1888), Il pp. 153 ff.
Mendelssohn’s ideas were originally expressed in his Phaedon oder iiber die Unster-
blichkeit der Seele in drey Gesprdchen (Berlin and Stettin, 1767).
Dye For Erwin, | use the reprint of 1907. The Vorlesungen, edited from Solger’s notes
(there was no final manuscript by Solger himself) by K. W. L. Heyse, appeared
in 1829, and was reprinted in 1929. I translate from the original edition.
23% Figures in parentheses, given in the text, refer to the 1907 edition of Erwin.
24. See Herbert Mainusch, Romantische Aesthetik (Bad Homburg, 1960) pp. 67 ff., and
the study by Wolfhart Heckmann, “Symbol und Allegorie bei K. W. F. Solger,”
in Romantik in Deutschland: Ein interdisziplinares Symposium, ed. R. Brinkmann

383
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(Sonderband der Deutschen Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und

Geistesgeschichte) (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 639 ff, esp. p. 640.
INS. See mainly Schelling’s Vorlesungen iiber die Methode des akademischen Studiums,
published in 1803, as well as his lectures on the philosophy of art (Philosophie der
Kunst), given in 1802—03 and 1804—05, which had a wide circulation in manu-
script form before they were published at a later date.
26. In Erwin, the distinction between the two modes, though present, is not fully
developed or explicitly stated. In the Vorlesungen, Solger devoted more attention
to this subject, and his formulations are more explicit. See especially pp. 132 ff.
for a thorough and interesting discussion of allegory and sign.
2a: Also available in reprints.
28. Philipp Otto Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1840). References
are given in parentheses in the text, Roman numerals indicating the volume,
Arabic the page number.
29. See M. Barasch, Light and Color in Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York,
1978), passim, esp. pp. 22 ts WA Te
30. In a forthcoming study on color symbolism, I discuss in detail some of these
earlier attempts. The study will be published in the acts of a Philadelphia
symposium (Temple University) on color in Renaissance art.
Si See my Light and Color, pp. 178 ff.
oy, See Heinz Lippuner, Wackenroder, Tieck und die bildende Kunst (Dresden, 1934), pp.
Lee 2 Seth.
33: Quoted (and translated) from Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed.
S. Hinz (Berlin, 1968). The page numbers of this edition are given, in parenthe-
ses, in the text after every quotation.
34. See above, pp. 259 ff.
352 See Leone Battista Alberti on Painting and on Sculpture, with Introduction, translation
and notes by C. Grayson (London, 1972), p. 135.
36. F. W. J. Schelling, Rede iiber das Verhdltnis der bildenden Kiinste zur Natur (Philoso-
phische Bibliothek, Heft 60) (Leipzig, 1911).
37. For this quotation, see Caspar David Friedrich, Bekennrhice (Leipzig, 1924; 1840),
p. 63.
38. I quote from John Durand’s translation of Taine’s lectures, to be found in
Philosophy of Art, (New York, 1888). References to this edition are given in
parentheses in the text, Roman numerals referring to the volume, Arabic
numerals to the page numbers.
39. This particular character of Taine’s approach has often been noted. See, for
example, René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, IV, The Later
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 27-57, esp. pp. 41 ff Wellek gives
valuable references to further critical literature.
40. For brief references to some earlier versions of this problem, see Theories of Art,
pp. 125 ff
41. Taine’s dependence on Hegel in matters of aesthetics has been stressed by René
Wellek in his A History ofModern Criticism, IV, pp. 35 ff.

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 The Artist

42. For a possible connection between Taine and Condillac, see Wellek, A History,
LV, )p.139:
43. See, for instance, what Diderot says about Chardin in his review of the Salon of
1765: “If it is true, as the philosophers say, that there is nothing real but our
sensations, that neither the emptiness of space nor even the solidity of bodies
possesses anything in itself of what we experience from it, then let them tell me,
those philosophers, what difference they can find, four feet away from your
paintings, between the Creator and you.” See Diderot’s Selected Writings, trans.
D. Coltman, ed. L. Crooker (New York and London, 1966), p. 154.
. See, for instance, what Diderot says in reviewing the Salon of 1767: “Everything
that astonishes the soul, everything that impresses it with a sensation of terror,
leads to the sublime.” Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 174.
. Wellek, A History, IV, pp. 27, 32 ff.
. Ibid’, P. 41.
. Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris, 1864), V, pp. 4 ff. And see Wellek, IV,
p- 45.
. See Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung, in Winckelmann’s Werke, ed. Fernow (Dresden,
1808), I, p. 9, and especially his History of Ancient Art, (English translation by G.
Henry Lodge (Boston, 1860), the first part of Chapter IV.
49. The literature on this subject is, of course, huge. Consult Harry Levin, The Gates
of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 64 ff., for the
general contexts of realism. And see René Wellek’s article “The Concept of
Realism in Literary Scholarship” in Wellek’s Concepts of Criticism (New Haven
and London, 1963), pp. 222—255, for the history of the term in literary criticism.
Emile Bouvier’s La bataille réaliste (1844-1857 (Paris, 1913) is also essential. An
orientation on the history of the term and the movement in nineteenth-century
art (primarily painting) is given by Linda Nochlin in Realism (Penguin Books,
1971).
50. For Proudhon as a utopian, a matter that has some relation to his views on art,
see Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World
(Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 740-747. A great deal of information is collected
in the dissertation by Pierre Palix, Le goéit littéraire et artistique de P. J. Proudhon
(Lille and Paris, 1977). For Proudhon’s views on the visual arts, see esp. pp.
815-1003.
Cyl See P. J. Proudhon, Contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misére (Paris,
1850), p. 326, and Du principe de l'art et de sa destination social (Paris, 1865), pp. 15
ff. (here quoted from Palix, Le godt littéraire et artistique de P. J. Proudhon, pp. 873
and 905).
oy, In De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église (Paris, 1930; originally published
1858), Ill, pp. 582 ff; Palix, pp. 887 ff.
53: I use the English translation of Elizabeth Fraser, in Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, ed. S. Edwards (Garden City, N. Y., 1969), pp. 214 ff. The original is
in Du principe de l'art, p. 310.
54. Selected Writings, p. 216; Du principe de l'art, p. 316.

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 Modern Theories of Art

Se) Selected Writings, p. 217; Du principe de l'art, pp. 319 ff. “Household interiors” are
not precisely images of man, but they clearly are the environment shaped by
man. Proudhon actually adduces this example, as the others, to indicate the
expression of a social mood, namely cheerfulness.
56. See Palix, p. 876. This note seems not have been published before Palix.
Sy The best survey of Champfleury’s views is still Emile Bouvier, La bataille réliste
(1844-1857) (Paris, 1913). | use the reprint of 1973. For Champfleury’s attitude
towards the art of the past, see especially pp. 214 ff.
58. See Champfleury’s Pamphlet of September 24—28, quoted by Bouvier in La bataille
réaliste, p. 230.
59. See Bouvier, pp. 218 ff.
60. Ibid., pp. 230 ff.
61 I am quoting and translating from the modern reprint: Champfleury, Grandes
figures d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: Balzac, Gérard de Nerval, Wagner, Courbet (Geneva,
1968), p. iii
62. Quoted in Bouvier, p. 249.
63. For the meaning of “simplicity” in Winckelmann’s thought, see above, pp. 00 ff.
64. Grandes figures, p. 239.
65. See Bouvier, p. 221.
66. Grandes figures, p. 225.
67. Ibid., p. 252.
68. Ibid., p. 253.
69. Ibid., p. 257.
70. The literature on the request that artists turn to their own time is of course
quite large, and little of it is devoted to the reasons for the critics’ attitude. But
see the concise analysis by Linda Nochlin in Realism, pp. 104 ff.
ike Grandes figures, p. 253.
2s See below, pp. 376 ff.
qs Grandes figures, p. 236.
74. See P. Cailler, ed., Courbet: Raconté par lui-méme et par ses amis, (Geneva, 1950), I,
p. 48. English translation in Elizabeth G. Holt, From the Classicists to the Impression-
ists: A Documentary History of Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (Garden
City, N. Y., 1966), p. 348.
Uy Holt, From the Classicists to the Impressionists, p. 349.
76. Quoted in Bouvier, p. 231.
ite I use a reprint of the English translation (New York, 1963), with an introduction
by Meyer Schapiro. In quoting from Maitres d’autrefois, I will use this translation.
Page references are given, in parentheses, in the text. Schapiro’s remark quoted
above is found on p. ix of the introduction. For more recent discussions (in
English) of Fromentin, though mainly as a writer, see Arthur Evans, The Literary
Art of Eugéne Fromentin (Baltimore, 1964), and Emanuel Mickel, Jr., Eugéne
Fromentin (Boston, 1981).
78. See Mickel, Fromentin, p. 26.
12. Quoted in Mickel, Fromentin, p. 29.
80. See particularly the entries for January 11, 13, 23, 25 and February 4 of 1857,

386
 The Artist

in Journal d’Eugéne Delacroix, ed. P. Paul Flat, 3 vols. (Paris, 1893-1895), Vol. 3,
pp. 11 ff, 60 f.
81. See Eugéne E. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture Francaise du Xlme
au XVIme siécle (Paris, 1853—1868), and his Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier Francais
de l’époque Carlovingienne a la Renaissance (Paris, 1858—1875).
82. For this subject, see George Mras, Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art (Princeton,
1966), pp. 15 ff. I shall at times follow this study. In the emphasis on the soul,
Mras says, Delacroix was following Diderot. In addition to Mras, see especially
the observations by Jean Seznec in Diderot Salons, ed. J. Seznec and J. Adhemar, |
(Oxford, 1957), pp. 1 ff.
83. See Journal d’Eugéne Delacroix, III, p. 44: entry for January 25, 1857. And see G.
Mras, Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art, pp. 72 ff.
84. I use here Jonathan Mayne’s English translation of Baudelaire’s The Painter of
Modern Life and Other Essays, (New York, 1986), pp. 41 ff, esp. p. 48. For
Baudelaire, see the section below, pp. 362 ff.
85. See Journal, III, p. 232. This entry is reprinted in Holt, From the Classicists to the
Impressionists, p. 171.
86. See the letter to Constant Dutilleux of March 7, 1854, in Correspondance générale
d’Eugéne Delacroix, ed. André Joubin, 5 vols. (Paris, 1936-1938), III, p. 196. And
cf. Mras, Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art, pp- 53 ff.
87. Journal, I], p. 437: noted on April 6, 1856.
88. See his Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art, esp. pp. 78 ff
89. Both the original entry for May 9, 1853, and its amplification are given in Holt,
pp. 162-163.
90. See Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1971), pp. 79 ff.
Die Filippo Baldinucci, Vocabolario toscano dell’ arte del disegno (Florence, 1681), p. 148.
22% Ibid., p. 1.
93; Holt, pp. 162 ff
oO: In his Mellon Lectures, given in 1974 at the National Gallery of Art in Washing-
ton, D. C., and so far unpublished. In Janson’s /9th Century Sculpture (New York,
1985), some of the same ideas are suggested, but only in a vague and general
way.
OS: For “ruins” and follies, see the still unsurpassed work by M. L. Gothein, A
History of Garden Art, trans. Archer-Hind (London and Toronto, n.d.; originally
published in German in Jena, 1926), Il, pp. Sff.
96. Nicolas Boileau, the leading French critic of the Neoclassical age, in his L’art
poétique offers this advice to the poet composing a poem:

Polissez-le sans cesse et le repolissez;

Ajoutez quelquefois, et souvent effacez.

See Oeuvres completes de Boileau-Despréaux (Paris, 1835), 1, p. 244.

SHI. See Diderot, Salons, ed. J. Seznec and J. Adhemar, II (Oxford, 1960), p. 153. 1
use the translation given by Boime in The Academy and French Painting, p. 84.
98. Diderot, Salons, III (Oxford, 1963), p. 241.

387
 Modern Theories of Art

ve) Ibid., p. 242.

100. See Boime, p. 83.
101. See Mras, Delacroix’s Theory of Art, pp. 86 ff.
102. Delacroix, Journal, II, pp. 102 ff.
103. See Theories of Art, pp. 355 ff. with references to further literature.
104. Journal, 1, p. 459: note of February 23, 1852. For a discussion of Delacroix’s
theoretical views on color, see Mras, Delacroix’s Theory of Art, pp. 119 ff.
105. Plutarch, Moralia, translated by F. C. Babbitt, (London, 1927), I, p. 83. This
sentence is found in the essay called “How the young man should study poetry.”
106. See Diderot, Oeuvres ésthetiques, ed. P. Verniére (Paris, 1968), p. 674. This is the
opening sentence of the second chapter of the Essai sur la peinture.
107. Journal, III, p. 56: noted on January 25, 1857.
108. Dupuy de Grez, Traité sur la peinture pour en apprendre la théorie et se perfectionner
dans la pratique (Toulouse, 1699), p. 208.
109. Madame de Staél, De I’Allemagne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1818).
110. Baudelaire wrote this in his introduction to Pierre Dupont, Chants et chansons
(Paris, 1851); reprinted in Baudelaire, L’art romantique, ed. J. Crepet (Paris, 1925).
For the applications of the principle to literature, see the clear exposition in
René Wellek, A History ofModern Criticism, 1V (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 434-452.
111. L’art romantique, pp. 320, 284.
2: See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan
Mayne (New York, 1986), p. 204.
IUit3h Victor Cousin, Du vrai, du beau et du bien, ed. A. Garnier (Paris, 1917), pp. 223 ff.
(This was the thirtieth edition of Cousin’s work, a good indication of its
popularity.) For the problem in general, consult the still valuable presentation by
Albert Cassagne, La théorie de l'art pour I’art en France (Paris, 1906; reprinted
Geneva, 1979). For a more comprehensive view of the origins of l’art pour l'art,
see the article by M. H. Abrams, “Kant and the Theology of Art,” Notre Dame
English Journal 13 (1981): 75-106.
114. Cousin, Du vrai, du beau et du bien, p. 224. Here I use the English translation in
the Abrams article, p. 97.
1S: See Cassagne, La théorie de I’art pour I’art en France, pp. 142 ff.
116. This thesis has assumed many variations. The most sophisticated is probably
Walter Benjamin’s, best seen in his Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), esp. pp. 72 ff. In a more simplistic
form, this explanation is put forward by Arnold Hauser in The Social History of
Art (New York, 1958), III, pp. 147, 193, 211.
[MUZE These terms are used in the review of the Salon of 1859. See Charles Baudelaire,
Art in Paris 1845—1862, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford, 1965), p. 1954.
118. Art in Paris, p. 155.
Ibo: See the review of the Salon of 1859 in Art in Paris, p. 154; also Curiosités esthétiques;
L’art romantique, ed. H. Lemaitre (Paris, 1962), p. 319.
120. Art in Paris, p. 152; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 317.
121. Art in Paris, p. 162; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 329.

388
 The Artist

122 The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 102 f.; Curiosités esthétiques, p- 630.
125) Art in Paris, p. 157; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 322.
124. Art in Paris, p. 162; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 329.
125. Art in Paris, p. 159; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 325. For the problem of imagination in
English aesthetics of the early nineteenth century, I should like to refer again to
James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981). See especially pp. 172-183, for the distinction between “fancy”
and “imagination.” In English aesthetic thought, however, it is literary produc-
tion that occupies the attention of the writers. Questions of the specifically visual
imagination are less prominent than in Baudelaire.
126. The Painter of Modern Life, p- 47; Curiosités esthétiques, p- 429.
N27 Art in Paris, p. 155; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 320.
128. Art in Paris, p. 156; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 321.
129. Art in Paris, p. 50; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 108.
130. Art in Paris, p27; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 118. Heine wrote his piece as a review
of the Salon of 1831, and it was published in a French translation.
131. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, IV, p. 439.
132. Ibid., p. 438.
133. The literature on Swedenborg and his influence on eighteenth-and nineteenth-
century thought is large. A clear and detailed representation of his doctrine is
found in Ernst Benz, Emanuel Swedenborg: Naturforscher und Seher (Munich, 1948),
esp. pp. 387-576. For his impact on Coleridge (who has many parallels with
Baudelaire), see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford,
1969), esp. pp. 283 ff.
134. Quoted in Wellek, p. 438.
135. Curiosités esthétiques, p. 676. The article is not included in the English translations
of Baudelaire’s criticism I have used in this section. The English wording is taken
from Wellek, p. 438.
136. See Curiosités esthétiques, p. 213. The quotation is taken from the review of the
1855 world exhibition, which, so far as | know, has not been translated into
English.
137. Quoted in Wellek, p. 439.
138. Curiosités esthétiques, p. 734. The translation is Wellek’s, p. 441. This passage is
found in Baudelaire’s discussion of Victor Hugo, but obviously it is also valid for
the painter.
139. Quoted after Wellek, p. 436.
140. The Painter ofModern Life, p. 45; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 426.
141. The Painter of Modern Life, p. 45; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 426.
142. The Painter ofModern Life, p. 44; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 425.
143. Though this famous maxim has been used very frequently, there seems to be no
comprehensive study of its history in the theory of the visual arts. For some of
the uses made of it in modern criticism and theoretical thought, see above, pp.
17 ff., 130 ff.
144, Wellek, p. 443.

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 Modern Theories of Art

145. Quotations after Wellek, p. 450.

146. See The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 1-40; Curiosités esthétiques, pp. 453-502 (the
whole essay). The title of Chapter XI of the essay (in English) is translated as “In
Praise of Cosmetics.” The French maquillage, the word Baudelaire uses, is more
correctly translated as “make-up,” and this term, I believe, also better expresses
the author’s intention.
147, The Painter of Modern Life, p. 31; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 490.
148. See J. de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Petersbourg (Paris, n. d.), I, p. 235. Baudelaire
himself said elsewhere that Joseph de Maistre, together with Edgar Allan Poe,
“taught [him] to think.” See note 1 (by the editor) in Curiosités esthétiques, p. 490.
149. The Painter of Modern Life, p. 34; Curiosités esthétiques, p. 493.
150. See Theories of Art, pp. 95 ff., with references to further discussions.
Wet See “Die klassische und die christliche Rechtfertigung des Hasslichen in mittelal-
terlicher Literatur,” in Hans Robert Jauss, Alteritat und Modernitdt der mittelalter-
lichen Literatur (Munich, 1977), pp. 143-168.
52s Victor Hugo, Cromwell (Paris, n. d.; editions ne varietur), pp. 1-47.
153. Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Hasslichen (KOnigsberg, 1853), p. 7.
154: Cromwell, p. 8.
P55: Aesthetik des Hasslichen, pp. 35 ff.
156. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
LS: The Painter ofModern Life, pp. 153-154; Curiosités sethétiques, p. 253.
158. For Viollet-le-Duc, see above, pp. 213 ff; for Champfleury’s work on caricature,
see above, pp. 340; and see also Jules Adeline, Les sculptures grotesques et symboliques
(Rouen et environs), preface par Champfleury (Paris, 1878).
159) The essays are: “On the Essence of Laughter and, in general, on the comic in
the plastic arts,” “On Some French Caricaturists,” and “On Some Foreign
Caricaturists,” published in that order, in The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 147-165,
166-186, and 187-196; and, in the same order, in Curiosités esthétiques, pp. 241—
263, 265-289, and 291-304.
160. See Marcel A. Ruff, L’esprit du mal et I’esthétique Baudelairienne (Paris, 1955;
reprinted Geneva, 1972), pp. 306-307.
161. For his discussion of Goya’s caricatures, from which all the quotations in this
paragraph are taken, see The Painter of Modern Life, pp- 191-193; Curiosités
esthétiques, pp. 295-299.

39°
 Bibliographical Essay

I have designed this bibliographical essay to serve a threefold purpose:

while it is primarily meant to assist the reader who wishes to follow up
discussions of the problems raised in this volume, I would also like to
record here some of my major intellectual debts and to indicate (so far
as this is possible in the limited space available) the reasons for my
positions. It goes without saying that in the following remarks I shall
not attempt to list fully even all the most important studies on a given
subject. On the contrary, | shall be selective, and choose only such
contributions as meet my triple definition. It should be kept in mind
that the progress of research into the different themes and areas
discussed here has been uneven, a state of affairs necessarily reflected in
this bibliographical essay.

le DHESBARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The literature on the Enlightenment, even if we limit ourselves to the

problems of aesthetics, is of course enormous, and thus makes it
especially difficult to make a selection. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment (original German edition, 1932; English translation, Prince-
ton, 1951), remains a classic contribution, though the author’s views

391
 Bibliographical Essay

have not gone uncriticized. For our purpose, Cassirer’s chapter on

aesthetics is particularly significant. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century
Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London,
1940), while it does not discuss painting or sculpture, is helpful because
the concept of Nature is of such crucial importance in the theories of
art. In the same context, we should also remember Johan Huizinga’s
persuasive essay “Naturbild und Gechichtsbild im achtzehnten Jahrhun-
dert,” available in a collection of his articles entitled Parerga (Basel,
1945). Arthur O. Lovejoy’s celebrated essays in the history of ideas,
including some chapters of The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History
of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936) as well as several of the articles
collected in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), also do not
deal directly with the theory of art, but are illuminating for an under-
standing of the contexts in Enlightenment thought. The religious aspect
of the Enlightenment is studied in Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century
Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). For specific developments of
Enlightenment thought in Germany, particularly in the early part of the
eighteenth century, Hans M. Wolff, Die Weltanschauung der deutschen
Aufklarung (Bern, 1949) provides stimulating instruction.
For an informative and useful survey of aesthetic thought during the
Enlightenment, see the appropriate chapters (especially chapters VIII—
XI) in Katharine E. Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics (New
York, 1939; reprinted New York, 1972). The classic work by Karl
Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie (1, Leipzig, 1914; Il, Leipzig,
1924), while not precisely limited to our period, is an enlightening and
thought-provoking discussion of reflections on art, especially on classical
art, focusing largely on the eighteenth century. Francis Coleman, The
Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment (Pittsburgh, 1971) surveys the
most important developments of aesthetic reflection in France. An
article by George Boas, “The Arts in the Encyclopédie,” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 23 (1964): 97-107, discusses views on the arts in the
pivotal work of the period, the Encyclopédie.
Studies dealing specifically with Enlightenment theories of painting
and sculpture are not numerous. For France, we have the still classic
treatment by André Fontaine, Les doctrines d’art en France (Paris, 1909;
reprinted Geneva, 1970), Chapters VI-IX. Art criticism, particularly by

392
 Bibliographical Essay

Diderot, has received close attention in recent years (see below). Useful
on a broader scale is the rich collection of lengthy passages, culled from
eighteenth-century French authors, arranged according to individual
topics in the theory of painting, with comments by Peter-Eckhard
Knabe, Schliisselbegriffe des kunsttheoretischen Denkens in Frankreich von der
Spatklassik bis zum Ende der Aufklarung (Diisseldorf, 1972).
I shall now turn to the individual authors.
Vico’s writings are available in a good English translation, and in
somewhat abbreviated form also in a paperback edition. See The New
Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas G. Bergin and M. H.
Fisch (Garden City, N. Y., 1961). The modern “discovery” of Vico, and
the subsequent flourishing of Vico studies (which are still thriving), has
so far not produced a treatment of Vico’s views on the visual arts. The
classic works on Vico, by Benedetto Croce (Bari, 1911) and Robin G.
Collingwood (London, 1913), concentrate on different problems. We
hope that Meyer Schapiro will soon publish his long-awaited study on
that subject. In the meantime, some discussions bring us closer to it,
though they do not deal with it directly. Isaiah Berlin’s Vico & Herder:
Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York, 1976), esp. pp. 1-142, is
useful to the student of art theory in outlining Vico’s intellectual
personality and his major sources of inspiration. Closer to our subject is
R. R. Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico
(London, 1953), but this also does not deal with the arts specifically.
Erich Auerbach’s celebrated studies of Vico’s attitude to literature are
illuminating to the student of visual images as well.
Dubos’s great work on the arts has not been translated, but is
available in a recent reprint. See Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et
sur la peinture (Geneva, 1967). A. Lombard, L’Abbé Du Bos: un initiateur de
la pensée moderne (Paris, 1913; reprinted Geneva, 1969) gives a balanced
account of Dubos’s life and work. Unfortunately for our purpose, he
does not concentrate on the visual arts.
Shaftesbury’s writings are best studied in the early editions of Charac-
teristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. | used the edition published in
London, 1732. In spite of his considerable influence on eighteenth-
century aesthetic thought, particularly in Germany, there seems to be
no comprehensive and systematic presentation of his views on the visual

393
 Bibliographical Essay

arts. An old German dissertation, Grete Sternberg’s Shaftesburys Aesthetik

(Breslau, 1915), attempts to do this, but is only a beginning. Interesting
observations are found, inter alia, in Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A
Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1935; Ernst
Cassirer’s The Platonic Renaissance in England (Austin, Tex. 1953; original
German edition, Leipzig and Berlin, 1932) deals with the influence of
the “Cambridge School” on Shaftesbury, and, though not focused on
problems of art, has much to say on Shaftesbury’s understanding of
artistic creation.
Modern study of Gerard de Lairesse attaches less importance to him
than did his contemporaries. In his time, Gerard was famous and
influential. The original Dutch version of his great book (Groot schilderboek
...) was soon translated into French as Le grand livre des peintres ou I’art
de la peinture consideré dans toutes ses parties, & demonstré par principes . . .
(Paris, 1787; reprinted Geneva, 1972). An English translation soon fol-
lowed and went through several editions. In modern research, he is
frequently mentioned, but usually rather casually. A thorough presen-
tation of Gerard’s “system” is given by Georg Kauffmann in his “Stu-
dien zum grossen Malerbuch des Gerard de Lairesse,” Jahrbuch fiir Asthetik
und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 3 (1955-57): 153-196.
English eighteenth-century reflections on art, concentrating on the
sublime, have been better studied, though primarily from the literary
side. For a synoptic view, one does best to turn to Samuel Monk’s book
on The Sublime already mentioned, especially Chapter IX, “The Sublime
in Painting,” and to Walter J. Whipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the
Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, Ill.,
1957). Marjorie H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1959) concentrates mainly on the sublime in nature. So also does
her entry, “The Sublime in External Nature,” in Dictionary of the History
of Ideas, ed. Philip Wiener (New York, 1973), pp. 333-337. There are
good modern editions of a number of eighteenth-century writings. See
particularly the edition of The Spectator by Joseph Addison (now Oxford,
1965); and of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (now London, 1958). Jonathan Rich-
ardson’s An Essay on the Theory of Painting: the Second Edition, “Enlarged
and Corrected” (London, 1725) is the primary text for our purpose. It

394
 Bibliographical Essa1y

was translated into French and published as Jonathan Richardson, Pére

et Fils, Traité de la peinture et de la sculpture (Amsterdam, 1728; reprinted
Geneva, 1972).

Il: BEGINNINGS OF THE NEW AGE

The writers and artists discussed together here are, as a rule, treated in
different disciplines, and the points of contact between them are there-
fore seen as marginal. This explains why Diderot is only occasionally
mentioned in modern discussions of Winckelmann, while many impor-
tant studies of Diderot’s attitude to the visual arts manage to disregard
Winckelmann altogether. This state of affairs will necessarily be re-
flected in our bibliographical comments.
Because there is no modern edition or translation of Mengs’s texts,
the best and fullest edition of his writings is still A. R. Mengs’ sdmtliche
hinterlassene Schriften, gesammelt, nach Orginaltexten neu iibersetzt und mit
mehreren Beilagen und Anmerkungen vermehrt herausgegeben von Dr. G. Schilling,
2 vols. (Bonn 1843-1844). In the original Italian, these texts appeared
as Opere di Antonio Raffaele Mengs, primo pittore del re cattolico Carlo III,
publicate del cavaliere D. Giuseppe Niccolla d’Azara e in questa edizione Corrette
e aumentate dell’avocato Carlo Fea, 2 vols. (Rome, 1787).
The most extensive discussion of the principles informing Mengs’s
thought is found in Monika Sutter’s dissertation, Die kunsttheoretischen
Begriffe des Malerphilosophen Anton Raphael Mengs: Versuch einer Begriffserlaute-
rung im Zusammenhang mit der geistesgeschichtlichen Situation Europas bis hin zu
Kant (Munich, 1968). The title of this useful study should not mislead
us into expecting to find a philosophical system in: Mengs’s writings.
Karl Borinski’s brief remarks on Mengs (Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheo-
rie, I], pp. 211-215) are illuminating, as is almost everything he wrote.
On Mengs’s beginnings as a painter (which may also shed some light on
his theories), one learns from K. Gerstenberg, “Die kiinstlerischen
Anfange des Anton Raphael Mengs,” Zeitschrift fiir Kunstgeschichte 3 (1933):
77-88. The relationship between Mengs and Winckelmann was already
seen by Goethe as a subject of significance, worthy of careful investiga-
tion. Monika Sutter gives a good survey of the problem in pp. 216-240

395
 Bibliographical Essay

of her dissertation, but one derives additional instruction from Gersten-

berg’s Johann Joachim Winckelmann und Anton Raphael Mengs (27. Hallisches
Winckelmannprogramm) (Halle a. S., 1929).
Winckelmann’s work is available in several editions (in the original
German, and in part in Italian). | have used Winckelmann’s Werke, ed.
C. L. Fernow (Dresden, 1808-1817), But for The History of Ancient Art, |
use a modern edition: J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums
(Vienna, 1934). Of this masterpiece there is an old, but adequate,
English translation: The History of Ancient Art, 2 vols. (Boston, 1860). Of
the short but important Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art there
was no full and satisfactory English translation.
The literature on Winckelmann is sizable, the various authors ap-
proaching their subject from different points of view and with different
interests in mind. The broad social and biographical context is given in
the still unsurpassed classic, Carl Justi’s Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenos-
sen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1866; sth ed., Cologne, 1956). Though it appeared
more than a century ago, it is still indispensable for all Winckelmann
studies.
On Winckelmann’s position in the history of German and European
letters, a subject that has occupied the minds of scholars ever since
Herder and Goethe, one learns from many and very different works, of
which I shall mention only a few examples. On Winckelmann’s position
in the tradition of modern humanism, Horst Riidiger, Wesen und Wan-
dlung des Humanismus (Hamburg, 1937) is enlightening. On his position
in the history of German literature, the reader may profit from Walther
Rehm, Gétterstille und Géttertrauer (Bern, 1951), pp. 101-182, though a
certain romantic leaning on the author’s part may inspire caution.
Henry Hatfield, Winckelmann and his German Critics (New York, 1943) gives
an analytic survey of the discussions inspired by Winckelmann’s work.
Karl Borinski’s observations (Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie, II, pp:
203-22) are again illuminating. An enlightening analysis of Winckel-
mann’s German style and of the significance of his language for broader
issues is found in Max Blackall’s The Emergence of German as a Literary
Language 1700-1775, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), pp. 371 ff. Winckel-
mann’s style of writing in general is analyzed by Hanna Koch, Johann
Joachim Winckelmann: Sprache und Kunstwerk (Berlin, 1957). Winckelmann’s

396
 Bibliographical Essa1y

role as the founder of the specifically Greek ideal in European, and

particularly German, thought and letters has deservedly attracted great
attention. The revival of Greek paganism in his thought receives a lively
discussion from Eliza M. Butler in the Winckelmann chapter of her
book The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge, 1935). Henry Hat-
field’s chapter “Winckelmann and the Myth of Greece” in his Aesthetic
Paganism in German Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) is devoted mainly
to the “cult of beauty” and what is called Winckelmann’s “paganism.”
In this context, Winckelmann’s conversion to Catholicism may become
a subject of interest also for the student of art theories. About the
broader implications of this subject one can learn from W. Schultze’s
concise study “Winckelmann und die Religion,” Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte
34. (1952): 247-260.
The Neoplatonic background of Winckelmann’s thought has fre-
quently been stressed. From a more philosophical point of view, it has
been convincingly argued by Ernst Cassirer in his book Freiheit und Form:
Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin, 1916), pp. 200-218. In the
context of art, this aspect has been treated by Rudolf Zeitler, Klassizismus
und Utopia (Figura, 5) (Stockholm, 1954), pp. 191 ff The chapter on
Winckelmann in Ernst Heidrich, Beitraége zur Geschichte und Methode der
Kunstgeschichte (Basel, 1917), pp. 28 ff., and Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche
Kunsthistoriker, | (Leipzig, 1921), pp 51-73, remain instructive and useful.
While the student of the theory of art is concerned with the whole
of Winckelmann’s work, he can deal fully with only a rather limited
part of Diderot’s oeuvre. Most of the writings pertaining to our subject
are conveniently collected in a volume of the Diderot edition by Paul
Verniére, Oeuvres esthétiques (Paris, 1968). Also useful is the English
translation, by Derek Coltman, Diderot’s Selected Writings (New York and
London, 1966). Diderot’s reviews of the great exhibitions, the “Salons,”
are now available in an exemplary edition: Salons, texte établi et présenté
par Jean Seznec et Jean Adhemar, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1957-1967).
Diderot’s attitude to the arts and his activity as aesthetician and
critic of art have been analyzed from different points of view. The
volumes of Diderot Studies naturally contain many investigations that
belong to our subject matter. The background of his activity as a critic
is well presented in the classic work, already mentioned above, by

397
 Bibliographical Essay

André Fontaine, Les doctrines d’art en France, especially in the last chapter
(Chapter IX), which deals with the new medium of the newspapers and
their role in the development of art and the study of art. The develop-
ment of Diderot’s thought on the arts has been carefully traced by
Jacques Chouillet in his dissertation, La formation des idées esthétiques de
Diderot 1745-1763 (Lille, 1973). Yvon Belaval’s work L’esthétique sans
paradoxe de Diderot (Paris, 1950) is an important contribution elucidating
the rather obscure and hidden outlines of Diderot’s aesthetic system,
but it focuses on the theater and on literature, almost completely
disregarding the visual arts. See also the interesting discussion by
H. R. Jauss, “Diderots Paradox iiber das Schauspiel (Entretiens sur le
‘Fils naturel’),”” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift N. F. 2 (1961): 380—-
413.
Diderot’s activity as a critic of contemporary painting is of course of
central importance for our subject. On the background and broad
contexts of this activity, one learns a great deal from A. Dresdner, Die
Entstehung der Kunstkritik im Zusammenhang der Geschichte des Europdischen
Kunstlebens (Munich, 1915; reprinted Munich, 1968), a pioneering work
that, together with Fontaine’s classic, established the modern treatment
of the subject. Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and
Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1980) has
made substantial contributions to the study of Diderot’s criticism.
Meyer Schapiro’s article, “Diderot on the Artist and Society,” in Diderot
Studies 5 (1964): 5 ff, focuses on social aspects of Diderot’s criticism.
The various studies by Herbert Dieckmann, mainly his Cing lecons sur
Diderot (Geneva, 1959), have helped to enlarge and deepen our under-
standing of Diderot’s criticism. Important for Diderot’s views on what
optical experience, the basis of pictorial imitation, can achieve, and on
its limits, is M. J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the
Philosophy of Perception (New York, 1977). Though this book does not deal
with “criticism” in the narrow sense of the term, the philosophical
discussion of the differences between the individual senses has a direct
bearing on criticism of the visual arts.
Of particular interest is Diderot’s attitude to the art of his time, both
with regard to the genres of painting and to the work of individual
painters. Relevant to the former is the article by Jean Seznec, “Diderot

398
 Bibliographical Essay

and Historical Painting,” in E. Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth

Century (Baltimore, 1965). For the latter, see the interesting symposium
Diderot et Greuze, Actes du Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand 16 novembre
1984. (Clermont-Ferrand, n. d.).
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses have been frequently reprinted. |
have used the edition in Everyman’s Library: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fifteen
Discourses Delivered In The Royal Academy (London and New York, n. d.).
About his theories, mainly in the context of Italian and French tradi-
tions, one learns from Rensselaer Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic
Theory of Painting (New York, 1967), pp. 19 ff., 62 ff. (originally an article
in the Art Bulletin).

lip NTT YAND: DIVERSE YOR THEAVISUAL ARTS

The system of the arts in philosophical reflection up to Kant has been

studied and clearly surveyed. Here, Paul O. Kristeller’s article “The
Modern System of the Arts” is the best-known presentation; frequently
reprinted, it is most readily available in P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance
Thought (New York, 1965), Il, pp. 163-227. For the period from Kant
onwards, however, the subject has lost its attraction. We do not have a
classic presentation of the theme in modern thought. There are, how-
ever, a great many studies about individual thinkers that are pertinent
to our theme.
Lessing’s writings are available in many editions and in various
translations. The analytical and critical literature dealing with Lessing’s
attitude to the arts is of course also rather large, though some of the
subjects of particular interest for our purpose have not been sufficiently
studied; students analyzing Lessing’s aesthetics have naturally been
concerned mainly with literature. For the background and origins of
Lessing’s comparison of the arts, one still learns a great deal from Hugo
Bliimner’s Lessings Laokoon (Berlin, 1880). A recent interpretation from a
modern point of view of the Laocoén, and of the German philosophical
tradition immediately preceding Lessing, is both instructive and stimu-
lating: David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocodn: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the

399
 Bibliographical Essay

Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984). Henry Hatfield, in the Lessing chapter

of his Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature (pp. 14-32), focuses on
Lessing’s essay “How the Ancients Represented Death,” but is more
concerned with general cultural trends than with any reflection con-
cerning the variety and unity of the arts. Karl Borinski’s brief remarks
on Lessing’s theory of illusion and expression (Die Antike in Poetik un
Kunsttheorie, II, pp. 225-230) raise broad problems. E. H. Gombrich’s
“Lessing,” Proceedings of the British Academy 42 (1957): 133-156 (now
reprinted in Gombrich’s Tributes [Oxford, 1984]) is a lively discussion of
Lessing’s attitude to the visual arts.
Herder’s thought and impact have of course been studied. Of works
in English, we learn much from the second part of Isaiah Berlin’s work
mentioned above (Vico and Herder) as well as from the more recent study
by H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge,
1970). Few students of Herder have devoted their efforts to his theory
of the visual arts. His Plastik is of course included in all major editions
of his works, but only one serious study of what it says about the
foundations of sculpture, and by implication of painting, is available: see
Bernard Schweitzer, “Herders ‘Plastik’ und die Entstehung der neueren
Kunstwissenschaft,” reprinted in Schweitzer’s Zur Kunst der Antike: Aus-
gewahlte Schriften (Tiibingen, 1963), I, pp. 198-252.
Hegel’s Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik are now available in a good English
translation: see Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M.
Knox (Oxford, 1975). A considerable literature, often of a rather com-
plex character, has grown up around this influential work. Lukacs’s
various Marxist interpretations of Hegel’s thought on art are famous.
They are perhaps best summarized in his comprehensive essay “Hegels
Aesthetik,” reprinted in Georg Lukacs, Beitrdge zur Aesthetik (Berlin,
1954), pp. 97-134. Here Lukacs is concerned mainly with general
philosophical and historical themes, and deals only marginally with the
arts. In another essay, “Hegels Lésungsversuch,” in the context of
Lukacs’s discussion of “specificity” (Besonderheit) as the particular cate-
gory of aesthetics, he attempts an explanation of the concept in the
development of German idealistic philosophy. Here, too, the arts are
hardly discussed. See Georg Lukacs, Uber die Besonderheit als Kategorie der
Aesthetik (Neuwied and Berlin, 1967), pp. 47-92. An altogether different

400
 Bibliographical Essay

approach informs the interesting presentation by Peter Szondi in his

“Hegels Lehre von der Dichtung.” See his Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie |
(Frankfurt am Main, 1974), pp. 269-511. Though Szondi is mainly
concerned with poetry, as his title indicates, he also makes interesting
observations on the visual arts. Jack Kaminsky, Hegel on Art: An Interpre-
tation of Hegel’s Aesthetics (New York, 1962) is a balanced presentation of
Hegel’s views. For our purpose, Chapters IV and VI are of particular
importance, but in Hegel’s thought, as we know, it is very difficult to
consider any one subject in isolation from others.
Scholarly investigation of thought on synaesthesia, especially in the
visual arts, is both limited and lacking in systematic approach. Leo
Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, 1963) is a
brilliant discussion of a complex of ideas that is naturally linked with
our subject, but stops long before our period and does not deal with
artistic application of synaesthesia. For ideas current in the Renaissance
and Baroque, one learns a great deal from Albert Wellek, “Renaissance-
und Barock-Synaesthesie: Geschichte des Doppelempfindens im 16. und
17. Jahrhundert,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literaturwissenschaft und Geis-
tesgeschichte 9 (1931): 534-584. For the subject in Romantic literature, see
E. von Erhardt-Siebold, “(Harmony of the Senses in English, German
and French Romanticism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association
47 (1932): 577-592. A recent study by Edward Lockspeiser, Music and
Painting: A Study in Comparative Ideas from Turner to Schoenberg (New York,
1973), focuses mainly on later stages of reflections on synaesthesia than
those discussed in the present volume.
I shall deal with the ideas of Delacroix and Baudelaire in the last
section of this essay.

IV: THE SYMBOL

The literature concerning symbol and symbolism is enormous. How-

ever, with regard to certain specific and well-defined areas, one still
awaits a critical discussion.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries inherited Renais-
sance visual symbolism, treated in such classics as Erwin Panofsky’s

401
 Bibliographical Essay

Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939; reprinted 1962). Jean Seznec, The
Survival of the Pagan Gods (New York, 1953) gives a broad and fascinating
panorama of mythological symbolism; E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images:
Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972) attempts a psychological
interpretation of Renaissance approaches to mythologies (see especially
“Icones symbolicae’”’).
Of particular value for the period discussed here is S. A. Sorensen,
Symbol und Symbolismus in den dsthetischen Theorien des 18. Jahrhunderts und der
deutschen Romantik (Copenhagen, 1963). The clear and balanced presen-
tation of Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982),
especially Chapter 6 (“The Romantic Crisis”), deals with literature, but
is helpful also for our purpose.
The authors discussed in this chapter have been treated very un-
evenly by modern scholarship. In the rather large literature on Winck-
elmann, there is little discussion of his Versuch iiber die Allegorie, nor is
there a translation of the text into English. Creuzer’s contribution to
the study of symbolism, on the other hand, has received a significant
amount of scholarly attention. Arnaldo Momigliano’s article ‘Friedrich
Creuzer and Greek Historiography,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 9 (1946): 152-163, though focusing on historiography, is a good
introduction to our author. A recent study of Creuzer’s basic concepts,
as they emerge from his monumental work, is by Marc-Matthieu
Munch, La ‘Symbolique’ de Friedrich Creuzer (Association des publications
prés des universités de Strasbourg, fasc. 155) (Paris, n. d.). About the
impact of Creuzer’s Symbolik, one learns from Ernst Howald’s interesting
collection of documents, Der Streit um Creuzers Symbolik (Tiibingen, 1926).
See also Todorov’s Theories of the Symbol, pp. 216 ff. A study of Creuzer’s
writing from the point of view of the visual arts (for which the four
volumes of the Symbolik would provide interesting material) is still
missing. | quote Creuzer from the first edition (Symbolik und Mythologie
der alten Volker, 1810-1812). The work was so successful that a second
edition was soon necessary. A decade after the fourth volume appeared
in print, an abridged edition, containing only some nine hundred pages,
was published in Leipzig (1822).
Bachofen aroused much curiosity and also attracted scholarly atten-
tion. A complete edition of his works (in the German original) is now

402
 Bibliographical Essay

available. The selection in English, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected
Writings of J. J. Bachofen, translated by R. Mannheim (Princeton, 1967),
gives a balanced picture of his ideas. An introductory survey of Bacho-
fen’s thought can be found in the introduction to this work. C. A.
Bernoulli’s Johann Jakob Bachofen als Religionsforscher (Leipzig, 1924) is a
traditional assessment of Bachofen’s work. For a modern approach, one
may turn to Hans Kippenberg’s interesting introduction to his recent
selection from Bachofen’s works, Mutterrecht und Urreligion (Stuttgart,
1984), pp. ix—lv. Lionell Gossman, Orpheus philologus: Bachofen versus Mommsen
on the Study of Antiquity (Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, Vol. 73, Part ¢) (Philadelphia, 1983) deals with a specific subject
not directly pertaining to ours; nevertheless, Gossman’s study is helpful
also to the student of Bachofen’s views concerning symbolic imagery.
Reflections on landscape as a symbolic form, mainly by painters in
the last years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth
centuries, remained fragmentary, although when seen together, they
amount to a significant statement. A recent collection of studies edited
by M. Smuda, Landschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), though not precisely
focused on the years discussed here, may be helpful for our investiga-
tion. Herbert von Einem’s thoughtful study “Die Symbollandschaft der
deutschen Romantik,” best available in the author’s Stil und Uberlieferung:
Aufsdtze zur Kunstgeschichte des Abendlandes (Diisseldorf, 1971), pp. 210-
226, though dealing with the paintings themselves, introduces the reader
to the thoughts and reflections of the artists. Von Einem’s Deutsche
Malerei des Klassizismus und der Romantik: 1760 bis 1840 (Munich, 1978) is
also stimulating and helpful in elucidating the Romantics’ attitudes to
landscape as a kingdom of symbols.
C. G. Carus, one of the most versatile figures in the intellectual and
artistic life of his time, was also a major figure for the subject here
considered. While Carus has not suffered from neglect by modern
scholars, his view of landscape painting as a form of symbolic expression
has not received the attention it deserves. Some of the monographs
devoted to Carus’s thought touch on the subject of the landscape in art
as a symbol, though they do so mainly for what these views may
disclose about Carus’s contribution to literature. See Erwin Wasche,
Carl Gustav Carus und die romantische Weltanschauung (Diisseldorf, 1933), pp.

403
 Bibliographical Essay

101—127, and Berna Kirchner, Carl Gustav Carus: seine ‘poetische’ Wissenschaft
und seine Kunsttheorie, sein Verhaltnis zu Goethe und seine Bedeutung fiir die
Literaturwissenschaft (Bonn, 1962), pp. 36-43. Carus’s own work, Die
Symbolik der menschlichen Gestalt (Leipzig, 1953), though not mentioning
landscape, helps one to understand his views of how real forms in
nature, and in their representation by artists, can be symbolic.
Caspar David Friedrich’s significance as an artist, and more particu-
larly his role in the history of landscape painting, has not gone unno-
ticed in modern scholarship. His written notes, modest to be sure, were
used only to help explain his paintings. They also contribute, however,
to the Romantic theory of the symbolic expression of nature.
The symbolism of color is a time-honored subject; it has evoked
interest in various fields of study, most of them far removed from art
or even from aesthetics. Yet in spite of the age-old interest in the
subject, we still do not have an authoritative survey of this theme.
Individual publications at least indicate something of the subject’s broad
scope. See, for example, Eranos Yearbook 1972 (Vol. 41 of the series),
titled The Realms of Colour (Leiden, 1974), with contributions ranging
from a discussion of color symbolism in Shiite cosmology or color
symbolism in Black Africa to an analysis of Orphism and optical art.
Philipp Otto Runge’s extensive observations on color in general, and
on color symbolism in particular, are scattered throughout the two-
volume edition of Hinterlassene Schriften (Hamburg, 1840-1841; reprinted
Gottingen, 1965). For a discussion of Runge’s color symbolism, see
Rudolf M. Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge: A Study
in Nineteenth Century Art Theory and Iconography (De Kalb, Ill., 1970),
pp. 86—96.
Goethe’s Farbenlehre [Color Theory], in the original German, is avail-
able in several editions. See also the well-known English translation,
Goethe’s Theory of Colour, translated from the German with notes by Charles Lock
Eastlake (London, 1840). Most modern discussions of Goethe’s color
theory concentrate on his dispute with Newton and on the scientific
validity (or lack of validity) of the poet’s theory; the interesting sector
on color symbolism is not given sufficient attention.

4.04.
 Bibliographical Essa1y

VALHESARTIST

Modern scholarship has been fascinated by the concept of the artist

(especially as “‘genius”), particularly as that concept emerged in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From the large volume of
literature I shall mention only a few general works. A concise introduc-
tion is Rudolf Wittkower’s entry “Genius: Individualism in Art and
Artists,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 11 (New York, 1973), pp. 297—
312, esp. section iv. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic
Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1953) approaches the problem
mainly from the point of view of the literary critic. Edgar Zilsel, Die
Geniereligion: Ein kritischer Versuch tiber das moderne Personlichkeitsideal (Vienna,
1918) draws mainly social perspectives. (Zilsel’s later work, Die Entste-
hung des Geniebegriffs [Tiibingen, 1926], is still a classic, but scarcely goes
beyond the Renaissance.) Recently, James Engell has ably surveyed the
views concerning the creative imagination as they developed among
literary men, with an emphasis on English culture. See his The Creative
Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
For William Duff, whose Essay was reprinted in 1964, see mainly
Engell, pp. 64 ff M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 88 ff.,
throws light on an interesting aspect of Sulzer’s reflection on art.
Wackenroder has elicited a considerable amount of comment and
investigation. Mary H. Schubert’s introduction to the English edition of
Wackenroder’s Confessions and Fantasies (University Park, Pa., 1971) is
informative and balanced. Marianne Frey’s study Der Kiinstler und sein
Werk bei W. H. Wackenroder und E. T. A. Hoffmann: Vergleichende Studien zur
romantischen Kunstanschauung (Bern, 1970) attempts a general outline of
what Romanticism thought about the artist’s nature and the process of
creation. Heinz Lippuner, Wackenroder, Tieck und die bildende Kunst (Dres-
den, 1934) attempts to focus on the visual arts. For Solger, see the brief
but clear summary by Tsvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, pp. 218—
221. See also H. Mainusch, Romantische Asthetik (Zurich, 1960), pp. 67 ff.
On a specific subject, but central for Solger, one can learn from a paper
by Wolfgang Heckmann, “Symbol und Allegorie by K. W. F. Solger,”
 Bibliographical Essay

Romantik in Deutschland: Ein interdisziplindres Symposium, ed. R. Brinkmann

(Stuttgart, 1978).
The student of art theory concerned with Runge will, in the present
context (in addition to what was mentioned in the note to Chapter 4),
derive instruction from J. B. C. Grundy, Tieck and Runge: A Study in the
Relationship of Literature and Art in the Romantic Period (Strasbourg, 1930),
and W. Roch, Philipp Otto Runges Kunstanschauung (Strasbourg, 1909). A
concise presentation of Runge’s color theory can be found in the recent
work by Lorenz Dittmann, Farbgestaltung und Farbtheorie in der abendlan-
dischen Malerei (Darmstadt, 1987), pp. 330 ff.
Hyppolite Taine’s work on the visual arts is now available in a reprint
of the 1889 English translation: Philosophy of Art (New York, 1971).
Students of art theory and of the history of art have paid only scant
attention to his work, but we can learn much about Taine’s approach
and the problems that concerned him from the chapter in René Wel-
lek’s A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, IV, The Later Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 27-57.
The concept of realism is one of the most complex notions in the
critical vocabulary. Uses of “The Concept of Realism in Literary Schol-
arship” have been traced by René Wellek in his Concepts of Criticism
(New Haven and London, 1963), pp. 222-255. Essential for any study
of the debate over realism in mid-nineteenth-century art and literature,
especially in France, is Emile Bouvier, La bataille réaliste (Paris, 1913;
reprinted Geneva, 1973). Linda Nochlin’s Realism (Penguin Books, 1971)
deals with painting rather than with theoretical reflection, but it also
lays out the ground for a study of the latter.
A small but good selection of Proudhon’s writings on art is available
in Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans-
lated by Elizabeth Frazer (Garden City, N. Y., 1969), pp. 214 ff. Eugéne
Fromentin’s classic work, the Maitres d’autrefois, is available in an English
translation, with an introduction by Meyer Schapiro. See The Old Masters
of Belgium and Holland, translated by M. C. Robbins (New York, 1963).
On Fromentin, see also Arthur Evans, The Literary Art of Eugéne Fromentiu
(Baltimore, 1964), and Emanuel Mickel, Jr., Eugéne Fromentin (Boston,
1981).
Delacroix’s writings are easily accessible. Of particular importance is

406
 Bibliographical Essay

Correspondance générale d’Eugéne Delacroix, ed. André Joubin, ¢ vols. (Paris,

1936-1938). For an English translation of considerable, and well-se-
lected, parts, see Delacroix: Selected Letters, 1813-1863, selected and
translated by Jean Stewart (London, 1971), and The Journal of Eugéne
Delacroix, translated by Walter Pach (New York, 1972). Delacroix’s views
on painting and on the artist’s task have been ably presented in a
systematic fashion, and with references to the traditional Italian theory
of art, by George Mras, Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art (Princeton, 1966).
Baudelaire’s writings on painting have been published frequently. A
good edition is Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, L’art romantique, ed. Henri
Lemaitre (Paris, 1962). In English translation, they are available in two
good selections: Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other
Essays, translated by Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964); and Art in Paris
1845-1862: Salons and other Exhibitions, translated by Jonathan Mayne
(Oxford, 1965). In modern critical literature, Baudelaire’s work as a
critic of art has been assessed several times. Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire
the Critic (New York, 1943) is an important contribution to our subject.
Gita May’s Diderot et Baudelaire: Critiques d’art (Geneva, 1957) attempts to
place Baudelaire in the historical context of the critical tradition in
France. Walter Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire: Ein
Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), though
not primarily concerned with criticism, makes an interesting contribu-
tion to the understanding of his work as a modern critic. The chapter
on Baudelaire in the fourth volume of Wellek’s A History of Modern
Criticism 1750-1950, the volume on The Later Nineteenth Century, pp. 434—
452, is a clear and erudite presentation of a complex but fascinating
subject.

407
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 Name Index

Abrams, M. H., 9, 405 on music, 212

Addison, Joseph, 46, 77 ff. music and painting, 213 ff.
Alberti, Leone Battista, 21, 39, 58, 62, ‘philosophic art,” 364
94, 318 on photography, 367
Alciati, Andrea, 224 ff. principles of his art theory, 363-373
Auerbach, Erich, 393 on process of creation, 373-376
Augustine, Saint, “creature cannot cre- “pure art,” 364
ate,” 130 rejects realism, 366 ff.
on sculpture, 214 ff.
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 238-245 on skill and technique, 374
on meaning of rope plaiting, 242 theory of imitation, 366
Baldinucci, Filippo, 44, 355 ff. on the ugly in painting, 380
quoted by Winckelmann, 100 on Wagner, AI
Batteaux, C., 290 writings on art, 362-363
Baudelaire, Charles Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 2, 8 f,
“art for art,” 363 ff. 90, 179
on artist’s productivity, 368 Bayle, Pierre, 35, 36
audience of sculpture, 216 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, 123
color, 211 ff. Berenson, Bernard, 208
on “correspondences,” 371 ff. Berlin, Isaiah, 9 f.
on Delacroix, 351 Bernard of Clairvaux, 313, 378
on Goya’s monsters, 382 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 96, 111
on imagination, 367 ff. artist of subjectivism (Winckelmann),
on inspiration, 373 ff. 100
on laughter, 380 criticized by Winckelmann, 99

409
 Name Index

Bocchi, Francesco, 123 Crow, Catherine, quoted by Baudelaire,

Boehme, Jakob, 300 368
Boileau, D. N., translated Longinus, 77 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 106, 108
Bonvain, Francois, 338
Borinski, Karl, 392, 395, 400 Daguerre, Louis, 367
Boudard, Jean-Baptiste, 228 Delacroix, Eugéne, 206-210, 347 ff.,
Bruno, Giordano, 38, 39 348-361
attacks rules, 129 Baudelaire on, 351
Burke, Edmund, 74 and Champfleury, 335
Butler, E. M., 97 and Chopin, 207 f.
on color, 359-361
Carracci, Annibale, 93 concerned with music, 206 ff.
Carus, Carl Gustav, 252—259, 318, on imagination, 351-354
403 ff. interest in photography, 353
Cassirer, Ernst, 391 ff., 394, 397 on Mozart, 207
Castel, Louis Betrand, 203 on sketch, 354-359
Castiglione, Baldassare, 299 Demetrios, 234
Caylus, Count, 163 Dezaillier d’Argensville, A. J.
Cellini, Benvenuto, 215 on attribution of pictures, 51 ff
Chambray, Fréart de, 137 on Rembrandt, 52
Champfleury, 330, 334-343, 380 Diderot, Denis, 4, 122-132
coined the term “realism,” 334 color gives life, 360
on Corot, 338 on David Garrick, 130
on Courbet, 339 on Greeks, 103
on Courbet’s Burial in Ornans, 340 ff. on Michelangelo, 130
on “the Greeks of David,” 336 on patronage, 128
on modesty, 339 ff. praises sketch, 357 ff.
on Raphael, 337 on sketch, 127
on sobriety, 338 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 15
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 131, 335 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 16-36, 153 ff.
Chevreul, Michel Eugéne, 201-206, on allegory, 33
267, 277 art and entertainment, 22
Christ, J. F., 51 on artificial passions, 21
Condillac, E. B., 324 on artist’s medium, 33
Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, discussed on avoiding boredom, 20
by Champfleury, 338 compares painting and poeury, 28
Correggio, 94 concerned with individual arts, 19
Cosimo, Piero di, 298 “copy,” 25
Courbet, Gustave, 333 ff. and humanistic tradition, 18
praised by Champfleury, 339 on illusion in painting, 26
Cousin, Victor, 364 ff. information in pictures, 29
Creuzer, Friedrich, 183, 233-238 on Lebrun, 22
influenced by Neoplatonism, 233 ff. natural signs, 31
Croce, Benedetto, 393 the power of painting, 30

410
 Name Index

on pleasure and need, 20 Gossman, Lionell, 403

on Poussin’s Death of Germanicus, Goya, Baudelaire’s response to, 381
29 Grass, Carl, 251
psychology of art, 25 Greene, Thomas, 111
“quasi-reality,” 26 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 131
Raphael’s Expulsion of Attila, 27 Grez, Dupuy de, 361
rejection of trompe l'oeil, 27 ff. Grimm, Friedrich, 126
on signs, 30 fi.
and subjects of art theory, 20 Hackert, Philipp, 251
on theater, 27 Hamann, J. G., 166, 299
and transitional period, 18 Heckscher, William, 273
Duff, William, 285-289 Hegel, G. W. F., 92, 178-199, 264,
Duranty, Edmond, 330 323
Diirer, Albrecht, 261, 286, 293, 294, art forms, 182
296, 300 beauty, 182 f.
Christian art, 190
Einem, Herbert von, 403 classical art form, 187-189
Engell, James, 405 on color, 197
Engels, Friedrich, 239 on Dutch painting, 66
the eye in Greek sculpture, 195
Félibien, André, 28, 63, 65 human figure in Egyptian art, 186
Fernow, Karl Ludwig, 249 on ideal, 182
Ficino, Marsiglio, 13 on painting, 196-199
Flaxman, John, 265 on the Passion of Christ, 191
Fludd, Robert, 201 on Guido Reni, 198
Fontaine, André, 392, 398 on sculpture, 193 ff.
Fresnoy, Charles du, 150 on sign, 181 ff.
Friedrich, Caspar David, 259-262, 277, on sphinx, 187
317-319 statue of Memnon, 187
on nature, 318 symbol, 181
Fromentin, Eugéne, 343-347 symbolic art form, 184—187
Fuseli, Henry, 309 ff. Heine, Heinrich, on Delacroix, 370
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 97, 165-171
Galilei, Vincenzo, 201 interest in Oriental art, 183
Garrick, David, 132, 136 on sculpture, 170
discussed by Diderot, 130 “species of beauty,” 170
Gautier, Théophile, 372 ff. vision and touch, 167 ff.
Gellius, Aulus, 106 Hipple, John, Jr., 77 f.
Gessner, Salomon, 247 ff. Hoffmann, E. T. A., 211
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 270-274 Homer, 160
concern with color, 270 ff. Hugo, Victor
on Sulzer, 293 on the ugly, 378 ff.
and Vico, 8
Gombrich, Ernst, 162, 178, 400 Ingres, J. A. D., 336

wir
 Name Index

Janson, H. W., 356 Maistre, Joseph, 377

Jauss, Hans Robert, 378 Manuel, Frank, 392
Justi, Karl, 90, 396 Mendelssohn, Moses, 302
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 90-96,
Kant, Immanuel, 24, 43, 157 292
influenced by Shaftesbury, 37 on primeval styles, 91 ff.
Kippenberg, Hans, 403 Michelangelo, 93
Kircher, Athanasius, 12 Diderot on, 130
Kleist, Heinrich, 260 Flaxman on, 265
Kristeller, P. O., 399 Piles, Roger de, on, 138
Reynolds on, 138
Lactance, 11 Taine on, 326
Lairesse, Gérard de, 55 ff., 57-73, 122, Momigliano, Arnaldo, 44, 402
274 Monk, Samuel, 77, 394
on genres of painting, 60 ff. Montfaucon, Bernard de, 12 ff.
Grand livre, 57 ff. Morelli, Giovanni, 49
hierarchy of genres, 65 Moritz, Karl Philip, 297
individual genres, 67 ff. Mozart, Delacroix on, 207
on “kinds of painting,” 63 ff. Mras, George, 353
landscape painting, 64 ff.
and mythographic tradition, 64 Newton, Isaac, 270
on ruins, 68 Nicolson, Marjorie, 42, 82, 394
on still life, 65
types of still life, 71 Panofsky, Erwin, 78, 401 ff.
Lebrun, Charles, 22 Pascal, B., 124
Le Nain, Antoine, 335 Pevsner, Nicolas, 54
Leonardo da Vinci, 203, 291 Piles, Roger de, 47 ff, 129, 153 ff.
color observations, 268 on Michelangelo, 138
comparison of the arts, 168 ff. on schools of painting, 49 f.
on painting and sculpture, 169 ff. on the sublime, 76
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 28, 149- Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 101 ff.
164 Plotinus
on aesthetic experience, 156 influenced Creuzer, 237
the beholder, 156 Plutarch, quoted by Bachofen, 244
“material confines” of arts, 161 Poe, Edgar Allan
painting and poetry, 157 Baudelaire on, 362
on signs, 153 ff. Delacroix on, 353
on space, 157 Poussin, Nicolas, 63, 201
on time, 157 on “aim” of painting, 23
on work of art, 155 letter on modes, 61
Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 67, 149 on novelty in painting, 39 f.
Longinus, 76, 128, 140 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 330-334
Lovejoy, Arthur O., 392 advocates realism, 333
Lukacs, Georg, 400 and Courbet, 331 ff.
 Name Index

Quintilian, 25, 45 on landscape painting, 247

on power of the eye, 32 on symbolism, 307
Schiller, Friedrich, 297 ff.
Raphael Santi, 92 f., 296, 298 ff., 299 ff. Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 173-178,
Champfleury on, 337 246 ff., 326
Dubos on, 27 ff. on form, 175 ff.
Reynolds on, 137 painting and sculpture, 175
Rehm, Walter, 104 Schlegel, Friedrich, 183
Rembrandt, H., 335 Seznec, Jean, 63, 398 f.
Richardson on, 81 Shaftesbury, Anton Ashley Cooper,
Hundred Guilder Print, 81 16 f., 36-43, 78
St. Peter’s Prayer before the Raising of artist’s freedom, 39
Tabitha, 81 on creative artist, 38
Reni, Guido, 93, 231 on enthusiasm, 42
Hegel on, 198 on genius, 38
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 132-140, 150 harmony, 37
on “borrowing,” 134 on originality, 38 f.
copying, 134 on Prometheus, 40
on “greatness,” 139 Solger, K. F. W., 305-308
imagination, 134 on imagination, 306
“originality,” 138 ff symbol, 307
on poetry, 136 Sorensen, Bengt Algot, 227, 402
theater, 136 Spanheim, Ezechiel, 45
Richardson, Jonathan, 50 ff., 55 ff, 73- Spence, Joseph, 164
83 Spitzer, Leo, 38, 401
on brushstrokes, 80 Spon, Jacques, 45
on connoisseurship, 50 Sulzer, J. G., 248 ff., 289-293, 298 ff.
on Rembrandt, 81 Sutter, Monika, 395
on Zuccari’s Annunciation, 81 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 211, 371 ff
Richter, A. L., 274-278 Baudelaire’s source, 372
Riegl, Alois, 208 Szondi, Peter, 401
Ripa, Cesare, 224, 228, 230, 257
Rosenkranz, Karl, 376 ff., 379 ff. Taine, Hippolyte, 320-329
Rubens, P. P., discussed by Fromentin, against prescriptive thought, 321 ff.
344 on artist, 324 ff.
Runge, Philipp Otto, 267-269, 310- Dutch painting, 328
SH7 education of the eye, 328
on ancient Greeks, 311 Greeks, 327 ff.
light and color, 314 “milieu,” 325 ff.
Ruysdael, discussed by Fromentin, Tertullian, 21
346 Testelin, Henry, 61 f.

Schapiro, Meyer, 23, 69, 128, 343 ff. Valeriano, Pierio, 13, 228
Schelling, F. W. J., 253, 318 ff, 326 f. Vasari, Giorgio, 177

413
 Name Index

Veronese, Paolo, 335 Warburg, Aby, 262

Vico, Giambattista, 7-14, 101 Wellbery, David E., 399 f.
creative imagination, 15 f. Wellek, Albert, 401
on empathy, 16 Wellek, René, 325, 326 ff., 370,
hieroglyphs, 12 406 ff.
on image, 10 ff. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 2, 90,
images of gods, 11 97-121, 226-231, 266
on language, 9 on allegory, 226-231
on metaphor, 9 on ancient artist, 118
on myths, II f. and the art of his time, 98-105
“poetics,”” 8 and Baldinucci, 100
primeval creation, 15 f. on copying, 112
on signs, 9 criticism of Bernini, 99
on spectator, 15 and German pietism, 115 f.
on symbolism, 13 ff on “origin,” 107 ff.
on understanding, 15 “paganism” of, 103
on visual experience, 14 f. on science, 104 f.
Viollet-le-Duc, E. E., 213, 380 on tranquility, 115
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 262—265 utopian trend, 113
Wittkower, Rudolf, 405
Wackenroder, 293-304, 341 Woelfflin, Heinrich, 170, 295
his style, 293 ff. Wollheim, Richard, 49
Wagner, Richard
Baudelaire on, 211, 363 Zilsel, Edgar, 405
Walzel, Oskar, 40 Zuccari, Federico, 81

414
 Subject Index

Academy of Art, 54 ff, 128 “Archetypes” (Jung), 243

Aesthetic experience, Lessing on, 156 Architecture, Hegel on, 192 ff.
“Aesthetics,” origin of term, 147 Aristotle’s Poetics, 96
“Aesthetics of content”? (Winckelmann), Art, Christian (Hegel), 190 ff.
226 Art, educative function of (Proudhon),
“Aesthetics of the Infinite” (M. Nicol- B32
son), 42, 82 Art and entertainment (Dubos), 22
“Age of Egypt” (Hegel), 186 Art and religion, 306 ff.
Allegorical compositions, Dubos on, 34 Hegel on, 180
Allegorical figures, Dubos on, 34 “Art as such,” 146 ff.
Allegory, defined by Dubos, 33 Art criticism, 122 ff.
defined by Winckelmann, 227 and art theory, 122 ff.
“invented” by Egyptians, 228 “Art for art’s sake,” 364 f.
Solger on, 307 ff. Art forms, Hegel on, 182 ff.
Amateur, 129 Artist, 284—390
“Ancient marbles” (Spanheim), 45 ancient (Winckelmann), 119
Antiquarians, 43—52 conflict with audience, 293
role in art theory, 6 creative, Shaftesbury on, 38
study individual objects, 45 his productivity (Baudelaire), 318
Apollo Belvedere, 92, 109 role in art theory, 6
Apotheosis of Homer (Ingres), 336 “Art of the Louvre” (Champfleury), 335
“Archaic,” Schlegel on, 177 “Art philosophique” (Baudelaire), 364
Archaic age, attitude toward, 177 Arts, diversity of, 146-223
Archetypal character of classical art Arts, division of, 321
(Winckelmann), 108 justification of, 22 f.

415
 Subject Index

Arts, division of (continued) Connoisseurship (Roger de Piles), 48

system of, 146-223 and art theory, 50
unity of, 146-223 Contemplation of ideas, 14
“Autonomous fragment” (H. W. Jan- “Copy” (Dubos), 25
son), 356 “Copying” (Reynolds), 134
Winckelmann on, 112
Baroque art, criticized by Winckelmann, “Correspondances,” poem by Baude-
100 laire, 210
“Beautiful style” (Mengs), 93 “Correspondences,” Baudelaire on,
Beauty (Beau), Diderot on, 127 371 ff.
and expression, 117 Courbet’s Burial in Ornans, Champfleury
in landscape painting, 257 ff. on, 340 ff.
species of (Herder), 170 Stonebreakers, The, Champfleury on,
“Beaux arts,” 147 ff. 339
Beholder, 160 ff. Creatio ex nihilo, 40, 289, 351, 353, 368
in Lessing’s thought, 156 Creation, artistic, 296
Boredom, 20 primeval (Vico), 15 f.
“Borrowing” (Reynolds), 134 process of (Baudelaire), 373 ff.
Brushstrokes, Richardson on, 80 Creative process, 297
types of (Lairesse), 58 ff.
Darkness, 235.
Canon, 108 Runge on, 315
Ceiling painting, 67 ff Decoro e gravita (Piranesi), 101 f.
“Classical,” Schlegel on, 177 Delectation, 23
Classical, Winckelmann did not use the Dexterity, manual, 301
term, 106 “Disinterested pleasure” (Kant), 24, 43
Classical art form (Hegel), 187-189 ‘Double relationship” (Chevreul), 202
Classicism, revolt against, 365 Dream, 300, 368
Color, Baudelaire on, 211 ff. Dutch painting, 334
Delacroix on, 359-361 assessed by Mengs and Winckelmann,
embodies sensual experience (Winck- 96
elmann), 121 Fromentin on, 334 f.
gives life (Plutarch), 360 specialization in 17th century, 66
and line, 360 Taine on, 328
Runge on, 314
and sounds, 278 Ebauche, 355
specific of painting (Hegel), 196 ff. Egyptian religion, Montfaucon on, 13
Color outlines, 260 Ekphrasis, 82
Color scale (Runge), 316 Emblem, 162
Color sketch, 275 Goethe on, 273
Color sphere (Runge), 268 Emblematics, 224 ff.
Color symbolism, 265-278, 315, 404 Emotions, Diderot on expression of, 130
Comparison of the arts (Leonardo), 168 Dubos on purgation of, 25 ff.
Connoisseurs, 43—52 Empathy (Vico), 16

416
 Subject Index

Encyclopédie, 126 Hierarchy, of the arts, 216 ff.

England, art theory in, 74 of genres, 65
English garden, 78, 137 of pictorial genres, 288 f.
Enthusiasm, 301 “Hieroglyph” (Bachofen), 242
Shaftesbury on, 42 Hieroglyphs, 371
Esquisse, 355 Creuzer on, 237
Expression, Diderot on, 130 manifest ideas, 14
and beauty (Winckelmann), 117 in Romanticism, 304
Eye, in Greek statues (Hegel), 195 Vico on, 12
education of (Taine), 328 ff. Horatian tradition in poetics, 32,
375
Facts (Taine), 321 Human figure, in Egyptian art (Hegel),
“Fine Arts,” 147 ff. 186
Finish in painting, rejected by Dela- subject matter of sculpture (Hegel),
croix, 359 194 ff.
Flower painting, Lairesse on, 68
Flowers, symbolism of (Lairesse), 72 Iconology, 224 ff.
Form, Winckelmann on, 120 Ideal, 113, 292
“mathematical,” Schlegel on, 175 f. Hegel on, 182
“organic,” Schlegel on, 175 f. Winckelmann on, 118-121
Freedom of artist, Shaftesbury on, 39 Ideal beauty, 117 ff.
“Idealisch,”’ 113
Gemiit, 95, 248 Illusion, created by arts, 151
Genius, 292 in painting (Dubos), 26
Duff on, 285 ff. Renaissance views of, 26
Shaftesbury on, 38 Image, Vico on, 10 ff.
Taine on, 327 Images of gods, Vico on, 11
Genres, pictorial, 288 f. Imagination
Genres of painting, founding of, 62 Bachofen on, 240
hierarchy of, 65 Baudelaire on, 367 ff.
Lairesse on, 60 Champfleury on, 342
Gesamtkunstwerk, 201 Delacroix on, 351—354
God as craftsman, 38 Duff on, 286
Grace, 94 Solger on, 306 ff.
Gracefulness, Mengs on, 94 Vico on, 15 f.
“Greatness,” Reynolds on Miche- Imitation, of Greek models, difficulty of,
langelo’s, 139 105
Greek culture, aesthetic aspect of, 104 of literary and artistic models, 110
Greek paradigm, in Winckelmann’s of nature, 110
thought, 102 ff. in Renaissance thought, 110
Reynolds on, 134, 137
“Haptic” experiences (Riegl), 208 theory of art, 290
Harmony, Shaftesbury on, 37 two kinds of, 134
Harmony of the spheres, 201 Winckelmann on, 109-113

417
 Subject Index

“Inner” and “outer,”’ Romantic distinc- Hypolidian, 61

tion of, 301 ff. Phrygian, 61
Innerlichkeit, 191 “Model,” 128
“Innermost consciousness” (Friedrich), Morality, of art, 126 ff.
317 criterion of judgment, 131
Inspiration, Baudelaire’s distrust of, Mountain, in landscape painting (Lai-
373 ff. resse), 64
Intuition, Creuzer on, 235 Music, Baudelaire on, 211 ff.
Invenzione, 39 Delacroix concerned with, 206 f.
Inwardness, 191 f. and painting, 213 ff.
Istoria (Alberti), 62, 117 Musical instruments, in still life, 72
Mythographic tradition, 64
Judgment on works of art, 125 Myths, Vico on, 11

“Kallistics,” 179 “Natural history,” concept of, 173 f.

“Kinds of painting,” Lairesse on, 63 ff. Natura naturans, natura naturata, 290
Nature, 290
Landscape, 245-278 Friedrich on, 318
Landscape painting, produces moods, symbol, 243
249, 251 Neoplatonic influence, on Carus, 252
Lairesse on, 64 on Goethe, 271
subtypes of, 66 “Noble,” Winckelmann’s concept of,
two types of, 249 ff. 118
Language, Vico on, 9 Non finito, concept of, 356
of art (Wackenroder), 304 “Novel of the artist,” the literary genre,
symbolic, 14 293
Laocoén, Winckelmann on, 109
Lessing’s, 151 ff. “Obedience” to examples (Reynolds),
L’art pour l'art, 379 133
Laughter, Baudelaire on, 380 Objects, meaning of, 257
Life cycle, 255 Occult theory (Baudelaire), 211
Light, Runge on, 314 ff. Origin, concept of (Winckelmann),
Lizard Killer, Winckelmann on, 109 107 ff.
“Logic of the body” (Taine), 323 Original, 287
Originality
Manner, Lairesse on, 59 ff. Reynolds on, 138
“Material confines” of arts (Lessing), Shaftesbury on, 38
161 Original sensation (Taine), 324
Memnon, statue of, 187
Metaphor, origin of (Vico), 9 “Paganism,” Winckelmann’s, 103
“Milieu” (Taine), 325 “Painters-philosophers,” Mengs’s fasci-
Mirror, the artist as, 291 nation with, 91
Mode, modes, 60 ff., 92 ff., 201 Painting, aim of (Delacroix), 350
Dorian, 61 art of Christian world (Hegel), 198

418
 5 ubject Index

Hegel on, 196-199 Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns,

and poetry, 157 182, 310
power of (Dubos), 30 “Quasi-reality” (Dubos), 26
schools of (Roger de Piles), 49 f.
and sculpture (Leonardo), 169 f. Raphael’s Transfiguration, Hegel on, 197
spiritual character of, 196 Raphael versus Michelangelo, 137
Panorama painters, 263 Realism, 329-347
Paradox on Acting (Diderot), 130 Baudelaire rejects, 366 ff.
Paragone, 32, 168, 207 origin of term, 329 ff.
“Parts of painting” (Mengs), 91 Proudhon defends, 333
Passion of Christ, subject matter of art, Religion, 312
191 and art, Hegel on, 180
Passions, artificial, 21 Runge on, 311 ff.
in Baroque art, 116 f. Rinascimento dell’antichita, 101
Dubos on, 21 Romantic art form (Hegel), 189-192
Patronage, Diderot on, 128 Rope plaiting, Bachofen on, 242
Peri Hupsos (Longinus), 76 Royal Academy, 132
Personification, 244 Ruins in painting, Lairesse on, 68
Bachofen on, 243 “Rules,” 128
Philosophers, in art theory, 5 ff. academic, 352
“Philosophical Art.” See “Art philoso- rejected by Giordano Bruno, 129
phique”
Photographic shot (Delacroix), “Sacramental imitation” (Greene), 111
Boat “Sacred sign,” concept of, 229
Photography, 322 Sacred themes, in Protestant art, 66 ff.
Baudelaire on, 367 Schizzo, 355 f.
Delacroix’s interest in, 353 Science of mythology, 231-245
Pietism, 115, 297, 300 Scientism, 322
Pleasure, motive of art, 22 “Script of the illiterate,” medieval no-
and need, 20 tion of, 23
search for (Dubos), 20 Sculpture, Baudelaire on, 214 ff
“Poetic logic,” 10 ff. ambiguity of, 215
“Poetics,” Vico on, 8 f. audience of, 216
Poetry, Reynolds on, 136 Hegel on, 193 ff.
Positivism, 319-329 primitive art, 217
Poussinists and Rubenists, 265 Sculpture, defined by Herder, 170
Presentiment (Ahnung), 297 ff. Seclusion, artist’s bent for, 41
Runge on, 312 Shaftesbury on, 41
Prometheus, Shaftesbury’s preference Secularization of painting, 65 ff, 325
for, 40 Sensation, 324
“Prospect painting” (Fernow), 249 Taine on, 325
Pure color, 204 ff. Sign, 308
“Pure pleasure,” Dubos on, 24 “artificial,” 154
“Pure sensation,” Vico on, 10 Dubos on, 30 ff.

419
 Subject Index

Sign (continued) artistic, 232

Hegel on, 181 f. in Hegel’s aesthetics, 181 ff.
Lessing’s use of term, 153 ff. and image (Creuzer), 234
“natural,” 31, 154 Solger on, 307
painting employs, 31 f in still life, 71
theory of, 302 f. Vico on, 13 ff.
Vico on, 9 ff. Symbolic art form, 183, 184-187
Silence, Winckelmann on, 104 f. Symbolik (Creuzer), 233 ff.
Simplicity, in allegory, 230 Symbolism, 224 ff.
Winckelmann on, 115 begins in Egypt (Hegel), 185
Simultaneity, 158 Synaesthesia, 200 ff.
“Sister arts,” 151 ff.
Sketch, shows artist’s character, 357 “Tactic” experiences (Riegl), 208
Delacroix on, 354-359 Terribilita, 93
Diderot on, 127, 357 ff. Theater, Dubos on, 27 f.
Richardson on, 80 Reynolds on, 136
and spectator, 359 “Theology of color,” 266
“Sobriety,” Champfleury on, 338 Time, Lessing on, 157
Sounds and colors, 203 Tomb, symbolism of, 241
Space, 157 Touch, 167, 209
Spectator, 294 Tranquillity, characteristic of Greek art,
and artist, 296 115
Dubos on, 19 Trompe l'oeil, 27 f., 152, 156
moved by work of art, 350
Vico on, 15 Ugly, the, aesthetics of (Baudelaire),
Sphinx, Hegel on, 187 376-382
Spontaneity, 126 ff. opposed to harmony, 380
States of nature and mind (Carus), 256 Victor Hugo on, 378 ff.
Still life, allegorical meaning of, 70 “Unspecificity” (Unbezeichnung), 115
defined, 69 Urbild, 291
Lairesse on, 65 Ut pictura poesis, 32, 149, 287
types of, 71
Stillness, 116 Vanitas still life, 70
Sturm und Drang, 250 Venus, Winckelmann on, 109
Style, “charming” (Mengs), 94 “Verstehen,” Vico on, 15
“high,” 92 Villa Pamphili, 241
“natural,” 96 Vision, 167
“significant or expressive,” 95 and touch, 167 ff.
Subjectivity (Richter), 276 Visual experience, 14
Sublime, Richardson on, 75 ff., 79 f.
Piles, Roger de, on, 76 “Wet drapery,” Herder on, 171
Shaftesbury on, 42 Work of art, in art theory, 123
Succession, Lessing on, 159 Lessing on, 155
Symbol, 224-283 “World art,” 184

420
ee
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CPSIA information can be obtained at www.ICGtesting.com
Printed in the USA
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\ NS
The book is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and
sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth
centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts,
particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation,
as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the
arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood
when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical
developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the
artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets,
and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of
modernism in art and art theory.
The aesthetic and intellectual developments of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries that changed our views of the artistic image
emphasized some central problems of critical reflection that became the
major themes of any thought on art. The artistic symbol, the comprehen-
sive system of the arts, and the relationship of one art with another are
discussed in detail. We see the origins of a new perception of the artist’s
position, as well as the rise of new values in art, such as the role of the
grotesque and the ugly in art. In his discussion of Baudelaire’s analysis of
Goya’s monsters, Barasch concludes that the modern world is reflected in
art whose beauty is independent of the beauty of nature. The book includes
thirty-one black and white illustrations.

MOSHE BARASCH, Jack Cotton Professor of History at the Hebrew

University of Jerusalem, has served as visiting professor at several
American universities, including Yale University, Cornell University
(Society for the Humanities), and New York University. He has written
numerous articles and books, including the companion to this book,
Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann, also published by New York
University Press.

About the cover: J.A.D. Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina, 1814, Fogg Art Museum,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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New York, NY 10003

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